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.
[1]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.
[2]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.
[3]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.
[4]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