World's First Supercomputer Built With SSDs

The world's first supercomputer built using solid state drives for storage is called Gordon. Get it? Flash Gordon? Raise your hand if you are old enough to remember Flash Gordon. Gordon uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives, and the system includes new software designed to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into "super-nodes," so users have immediate access to data, rather than waiting for the system to access particular drives. Allan Snavely, the SDSC's associate director, sees this as the world's largest thumb drive.