Quadrics (company)
In mathematics
See Quadric.
In business world
Quadrics Ltd. (originally Quadrics SuperComputers World) was formed as a joint venture formed with Alenia Spazio in mid 1996 out of the technical team of Meiko .The Elan2 network ASIC (a directly attached UltraSPARC UPA device) was dropped and a new PCI based device (Elan3) was instead produced. The initial Elan3 platform was UltraSPARC based but was quickly replaced by Dec_Alpha based systems as Quadrics formed a new relationship with the Digital. The combination of Quadrics and Alpha EV6 CPUs proved very successful and Digital/Compaq (now HP) rapidly became one of the world's largest suppliers of supercomputers. This culminated with the building the largest machine in the USA ; the 20TF ASCI Q supercomputer installed at Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory in 2002/2003. This machine consists of 2048 4*1.25GHz CPU EV67 Alphaserver SC ES45 nodes and two rails of the Quadrics QsNet network.
Quadrics also had success in selling Linux based systems, with the fastest Linux machine in the world (11.2TF) called MCR being built by LinuxNetworx and installed at Lawrence_Livermore_National_Laboratory in 2002.
Quadrics has three products of note:
- QsNet I - based around the elan3/elite3 Asics (350MBs @ 5us latency)
- QsNet II - based around the elan4/elite4 Asics (900MB/s @ 2us latency)
- RMS - a cluster resource manager software package
As of June 2003, 6 out of the top 10 fastest machines in the world were Quadrics connected.
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