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Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the available-at-every-pharmacy dept.

karvind writes "IBM Power Architecture Community Newsletter has a story about making a supercomputer (Number 4 on top 500 list) from easily available components (like BladeCenter and TotalStorage servers, 970FX PowerPC processors, and Linux 2.6). A joint venture between IBM and the Spanish government, it is named MareNostrum: the Latin term meaning 'our sea.' Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers."

16 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Humans are so behind the curve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am an African Grey parrot, and I can tell you that while you humans are celebrating this achievement, I and my fellow Greys are laughing at you. Supercomputers are old news to us; in fact, one of my friends solved the halting problem while taking a crap the other day. Seriously, people, we like you 'cause you feed us, but leave this kind of stuff to us.

    (I tried to register an account but /. thought my user name was too long)

    1. Re:Humans are so behind the curve by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 2, Funny
      (I tried to register an account but /. thought my user name was too long)

      What kind of troll would parrot back such a hackneyed old line.

      --
      "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
      --Dr.W.Edwards Deming
    2. Re:Humans are so behind the curve by TeknoHog · · Score: 2, Funny

      Are you an African or European par... oh crap, nevermind.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  2. It's all fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    but does it run Linux? Oh crap, never mind.

  3. Top 500? by Ubi_NL · · Score: 3, Funny

    (Number 4 on top 500 list)
    ...while being Number 6 on top 300 list, and Number 65 on top 2000 list.

    This is like those CDs that have 'best of the Top40' and not contain the top10 list of that

    --

    If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
  4. Cue the lame gags... by Sime208 · · Score: 1, Funny

    ...about it still not being sufficient to catalogue ones porn collection.

  5. War in the age of information warfare by flopsy+mopsalon · · Score: 5, Funny

    I happened to look at the Top 500 supercomputers site and I couln't help noticing out of the top 5 supercomputers almost half are in non-US countries like Spain and Japan. This is not to beat some kind of patriot act drum. Instead, it got me to thinking.

    With supercomputing powers now avaible to any country or group with a few readily available components, it is only a matter of time before these supercomputing powers may be used by a rogue state or radical group to cause havoc among electronic communications using methods like denial of service attacks, spyware, and crapflooding message boards.

    I think it is high time the nations of the world put their heads together and addressed this issue. For example, I don't think the US Federal Government even has any cabinet-level position like Secretary of Information Technology or something like that. When are they going to get with the times? It will probably take another terrorist attack or something.

  6. Sounds like by jim_v2000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers.

    Sounds like the specs of Microsoft's Xbox 3...

    --
    Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
  7. In other news, SHA1 was broken... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers.

    It's just the thing to find SHA1 collisions of ISO images in 2^56 operations...

  8. Well yeah,... by Create+an+Account · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...but how fast can it open Photoshop CS?

  9. DOES THAT COME IN A DESKTOP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    REALY, DOES IT????

  10. But really... by nicc777 · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...does it have an AGP slot?

    --
    Need an ISP in South Africa?
  11. Re:IBM eServers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm a republican man, porn in Barcelona ...

    umm ... you mean there's Republican porn over there? yuck! ... with all my parents from Barcelona

    Really? ALL of them, no kidding ... well, there goes one more failed genetic experiment. Better luck next time!

  12. Mare Nostrum by woah · · Score: 3, Funny
    Mare Nostrum is Latin for "our sea"?

    But I thought it was Ouray Easay!

    What's going on?

    This is all so confusing! I need to take a nap.

  13. Re:Imagine... by Ray+Alloc · · Score: 2, Funny

    You'll notice the "redundant" moderation, which is a perfect fit, given the context :-)

  14. Re:Supercomputer = Pile of computers? by dsevilla · · Score: 2, Funny
    Yeah, that's the point. Also, they don't even do any advance in programming models. Just MPI/PVM with my old friend fortran or C.

    Haha, but the funny thing is that they'll end doing high performance computing based on Web Services!!

    Best regards,

    diego.