The Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec has purchased a 2,024-processor supercomputing cluster from Dell for $7 million, the computer maker said Wednesday. The system, which uses Red Hat's version of Linux, is expected to have a peak performance of 13.9 trillion calculations per second, though actual performance is typically considerably lower.
The system uses 872 Dell PowerEdge 750 servers, which are 1.75-inch-tall rack-mounted models with single 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processors, and 576 PowerEdge SC1425 servers, which are the same height but use dual 64-bit Intel Xeon 3.6GHz processors. Extreme Networks and TopSpin supplied networking switches to join the systems into a shared computing resource.