Getting Intense About Data: The SDSC Gordon Cluster

There is a tendency to assume all supercomputing revolves around floating point performance. While crunching numbers is important, it is not the only challenge facing the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Indeed, one of the results of numeric supercomputing is the generation of answers that measure in TeraBytes (TB) in size. In addition, there are other extremely large data sets that challenge even the largest machines. For examples, bio-science (genome databases), climate modeling, earthquake modeling, astronomy, and other data rich areas are ripe for analysis ‚Äî if only there were machines that were designed to do Input and Output (I/O) as fast as they can crunch numbers…

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