TechWorld: Silicon Graphics is building the biggest ever Linux supercomputer. The Altix computer has been ordered by the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and will run a single Linux operating system image across 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processors with 3TB of shared memory, and deliver six trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS).

Rob Pennington, interim director of the NCSA said the new machine will be very different from the existing machines at the facility, which include several Linux cluster supercomputers. Until now, the largest shared-memory supercomputer available to scientists there was an IBM p690 machine with 12 32-processor nodes.

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