FC-AL can also serve online multidevice cluster applications. Designed for tightly coupled parallel processing, NUMA architectures let agencies build systems brick by brick, adding modules as requirements dictate. Enterprise application software can run on NUMA systems without modification. NUMA presents an application or operating system with a single, logical memory segment that maps to physical processor memory on physically separate nodes. A NUMA interconnect functions like a computer's internal processor bus.
Modules interact via a high-speed, bidirectional channel.
Depending on the configuration, NUMA systems can support hundreds of nodes made up of thousands of processors. SGI late last year contracted with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab to implement a NUMA-based system on 1,152 processors. The new supercomputer will comprise 10 SGI Origin 3800 servers, replacing a number of Cray supercomputers. The lab will use the NUMA system to run modeling applications that divide the Earth into large, interacting sectors. Performance is expected to reach 922 billion floating-point operations per second.