With the arrival of the Fall 2004 TOP500 list, two Linux-based systems now top the rankings of the world's fastest computers: IBM's BlueGene/L, at 70.72TFlops, and SGI's Columbia at 51.87TFlops.
Columbia went from order to up and running in 120 days—in an already-full machine room. The project required custom power distribution units, rewiring, plumbing and plenty of scheduling finesse from NASA and SGI experts.
Columbia's storage is 440TB of disk, some Fibre Channel, some Serial ATA. The system already has 650 users at Ames and at cooperating universities and national labs.
The 10,240 processors in Columbia make up 20 512-processor systems with 1TB of memory each. As shown in our February 2003 issue, the interconnect is SGI's low-latency NUMAlink.
High density, at 88 Itanium 2 CPUs per rack, made a water cooling system necessary. The blue hose brings cold water into the radiator, the red hose brings warm water out and the clear hose is connected to a tray to drain any condensation.
Photos: Michael Baxter
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December 2009, #188
If last month's Infrastrucuture issue was too "big" for you then try on this month's Embedded issue. Find out how to use Player for programming mobile robots, build a humidity controller for your root cellar, find out how to reduce the boot time of your embedded system, and if you're new to embedded systems find out the basics that go into one. You can also read about the Beagle Board, the Mesh Potato and a spate of other interestingly named items. And along with our regular columns don't miss our new monthly column: Economy Size Geek.
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