Wolfram Alpha gets supercomputer boost Captur50

With the public launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month is withstanding the crushing load the Internet can impose. But Wolfram Research revealed Tuesday it's building the service on the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer.

The machine, built out of Dell hardware by a company called R Systems, can sustain performance of 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to the November 2008 list of the top 500 supercomputers.

The system, called R Smarr has 4,608 processor cores using 576 quad-core "Harpertown" Xeon machines, 65,536GB of memory, and high-speed InfiniBand data-transfer connections, according to the Top500 site and a Dell case study on the system (PDF). It also uses both the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC Server operating systems, according to the Dell paper.
Alpha requests will be served from five colocation facilities, Wolfram Research said. There actually are two supercomputers in the project, with nearly 10,000 processor cores total and hundreds of terabytes of hard drives. More at; http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10238869-76.html