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Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore have setup a supercomputing cluster of over 1 million Linux kernels as virtual machines. They did so in hopes of better understanding how botnets operate.
"The sheer size of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand in even a limited way," said Ron Minnich, one of the researchers. "Many phenomena occurring on the Internet are poorly understood, because we lack the ability to model it adequately. By running actual operating system instances to represent nodes on the Internet, we will be able not just to simulate the functioning of the Internet at the network level, but to emulate Internet functionality."
Making the project possible, Sandia utilized its Albuquerque-based 4,480-node Dell high-performance computer cluster, known as Thunderbird. it took 250 virtual machines coupled with the physical units in Thunderbird to run the over one million Linux kernels. And this is just the beginning.
"It has been estimated that we will need 100 million CPUs by 2018 in order to build a computer that will run at the speeds we want," said Minnich.
Image Credit: abc.nl
Comments are closed on this article
Cache
August 03, 2009 at 5:24pm
Sadly, AVG would still run painfully slow on such a massive computer.
nightkiller
August 03, 2009 at 4:53pm
More importantly, can it run Adventure?
You choose a flightless bird as a mascot and wonder why it doesn't take off?
winmaster
August 03, 2009 at 3:48pm
Can it run Crysis?
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Shckr57
August 03, 2009 at 5:00pm
current cpus can not run crysis only for the sole factor that they can only handle 1 thread per core, or 2 with HT and crysis would need ( if i can remember) 1.5 million threads to run onb a cpu, so yes it can. and note that crysis uses fpc (floating point calculations) to determin points of a polygon, note why early games couldn't render a realistic cirle. the other type of rendering is called ray tracing. this form give you photorealistic quality, like revit for ex. when computers are powerfull enought to do ray tracing in REAL-TIME, that will be a revolution in gaming history. People will laught at crysis.
Devo85x
August 04, 2009 at 8:52am
Kind of a long response to a joke isnt it? Not to mention, im not sure you read the word LINUX
SuperiorBeing
August 03, 2009 at 3:18pm
Not to nitpick, but the article says 100 million CPUs, not 1000 million.
