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| CompAmerica Announces Viper VSX Supercomputer On the heels of announcements by Sun regarding its "Niagra", and IBM regarding its "Cell" chips, CompAmerica has released its Viper Supercomputing Complex (Viper VSX). Viper VSX is a supercomputer system capable of delivering up to 2048 simultaneous AMD Opteron 880 Dual Core Processors in a connective crossbar - switched fiber channel driven environment. Viper VSX is designed for applications requiring considerably more conventional computational capacity than found in what CompAmerica calls the: "highly specialized and very different programming models" that IBM Cell or Sun Niagara today allow for, while still competing with them. Viper VSX is programmable today using conventional programming methods. Its great speed comes from "Extreme Parallelism" and "Extremely fast transport busses", rather than relying on a single RISC processor accelerated by surrounding specialized graphics mathematical units, as in the case of IBM's Cell. CompAmerica built the Viper VSX system around its renowned AX6 Operating System. AX6, which supports what the company calls "probably the most robust operating systems resources in the world, thanks to its U-California Berkeley compatible Kernel has incorporated "virtual Windows 2003 uni-clusters" into the design. Windows/Vista/Unix family applications run in tandem. CompAmerica indicated VSX support also includes AX6's "8th Man" file, storage and data sharing facility allowing up to 255 VSXs, each with 256 Viper Compute Nodes to interconnect. It can form even larger supercomputer clusters of up to a million Opteron 880 CPU Cores. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |