The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) reports that the world's first supercomputer based on SSDs came online last week using 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives. It's also using software designed to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into super nodes. This grants users immediate access to data so that they don't have to wait for the system to access specific drives.

Last week the SDSC said Gordon uses 64 TB of RAM, 4 PB of disk storage, performs at 36 million IOPS (input/output operations per second), and comes with a hefty pricetag of $20 million USD paid by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Gordon is also now ranked at #48 on the official Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and deemed the most powerful supercomputer ever commissioned by the NSF for doing I/O and breaking the previous (2010) record of only 4.2 million IOPS.

“The era of data-intensive supercomputing begins with Gordon,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman. Every year we double the amount of information being generated, and we now are being overwhelmed by the data we are able to produce with our own computers. So it stands to reason that we needed a new kind of computer."


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