ABSTRACT
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) responded to the call with a proposal called Flash Gordon: A Data Intensive Computer. The proposal abstract provides the motivation for the design: "This project supports the acquisition, deployment and operation of a new supercomputing system suitable for data-intensive applications. Gordon is one of the most innovative HPC systems to be deployed in the NSF's open computing program. The Gordon Sandy Bridge compute nodes are hot-swappable, half-height blades based on the Intel Jefferson Pass motherboard, and Patsburg C600 series chipset. One of Gordon's most distinctive features, and the one that is generally cited as its most innovative, is the flash based I/O nodes. The Lustre-based parallel filesystem, Data Oasis, was designed to meet Gordon's 100 GB/s aggregate bandwidth requirement. The ratio of I/O bandwidth to Flops is useful for characterizing Gordon as a balanced system for data intensive computing.
