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The first of a new breed of supercomputers was born this fall when computer experts combined flash memory with supercomputer architecture to create Dash.
Normally, supercomputers are measured by how many floating point operations they can complete per second, also known as “flops.” And at a peak speed of 5.2 teraflops, Dash wouldn’t even make the top 500 list, where the slowest speed is about 18 teraflops.
“But if you look at other metrics, such as the ability to do input/output operations, it would potentially be one of the fastest machines,” said Allan Snavely, the project leader for Dash. “Dash is going after what we call data-intensive computing, which is quite different from traditional high-performance computing.”
Traditional supercomputers are suited to calculating partial differential equations representing complex systems such as the weather, said Snavely. Dash’s flash memory enables it to read and write data 10 times faster than a typical supercomputer, which makes Dash perfect for processing huge data sets such as the human genome or large astronomical sky surveys.
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