Dell Pushes In Alongside IBM in Saudi Aramco Linux Cluster

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

You may not know Saudi Aramco by name, but if you live in the modern world, you know what they do. The company, which is owned and operated by the Saudi royal family, is the largest producer of oil in the world. While the company does not provide sales figures to the public, it pumps out close to 3 billion barrels of oil a year, has immense gas reserves, and the largest refining operations in the world, probably yielding $60 billion to $70 billion in sales. Finding oil without spending big bucks on drilling is the name of the game in the oil biz, and that is why Saudi Aramco is investing heavily in Lintel clusters.

Saudi Aramco was smart enough 70 years ago to pit the world's largest oil companies against each other to gain access to the world's largest oil reserves--currently estimated at about 260 billion barrels in Saudi Arabia--and the company is smart enough now to pit IBM and Dell against each other for its Lintel cluster infrastructure, too.

Last December, Saudi Aramco announced that it would build a 900-node Linux cluster. The first part of the cluster was based on two-way IBM xSeries servers using Intel Corp's Pentium III processors running at 1.4 GHz. That cluster was eventually upgraded to include 281 xSeries machines using 562 of Intel's 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processors. This cluster ranks number 133 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, and currently has a peak theoretical performance of 2.7 teraflops, but on the Linpack Fortran benchmark, it tests out at about 609 gigaflops. Linux clusters are cheap, and so is Ethernet interconnect like that Saudi Aramco is using, but Lintel iron is not all that efficient.

Dell got a piece of the action on the Saudi Aramco Lintel cluster a few weeks ago, with the company acquiring an additional 910 two-way PowerEdge servers using 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors. Those additional Pentium III processors should add another 2.5 teraflops of computing capacity to the Saudi Aramco cluster, with about 520 gigaflops of floating point power as gauged by the Linpack benchmarks. Both pieces of the cluster are running Linux, but what commercial distribution--if any--is unknown. The cluster will run home-grown seismic and oil exploration applications. Dell has partnered with Scali AS, an Oslo, Norway company that sells a cluster management program called Scali Manage to operate its portion of the Lintel cluster.

Sponsored By SUSE LINUX

Mainframe Linux for IBM Midrange Systems · Available for i/p/z/x Series · Mainframe stability · Access to legacy data SuSE Linux Enterprise Server lets you keep your current environment and add the power of Linux. Utilize the best of both worlds, exchange data between each OS, all on one system. Get and evaluation copy today www.suse.com