Butte’s Big Sky Blue a super machine

You might not know that Butte has a supercomputer called Big Sky. I didn’t know anything about it until I called Earl Dodd, the chief consultant for the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center http://www.rmscinc.org/ , the nonprofit that administers the machine and promotes its use by organizations in Montana.

The supercomputer runs at 3.8 teraflops, doing 3.8 trillion floating point operations a second. You’d need hundreds of garden variety PCs linked together to match that power.

Dodd told me Big Sky can process visualizations of proteins and medicines, help project the course of a wildfire in 3-D, model the entire upper Clark Fork River basin and crunch large amounts of weather and climate data to find the best places for wind and solar energy development.

By MARK RATLEDGE missoulian.com

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/business/local/a420f9ca-2d5d-11e0-9520-001cc4c03286.html