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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."

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. specifically by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mare Nostrum refers to the Mediterranean Sea.

  2. Mare Nostrum by nebaz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mare Nostrum literally means "our sea". It is what the Romans called the Mediterranean Sea during the Empire. As you can see, it was an apt name.

    --
    Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
  3. timely and focused PR by bandix · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is all about timely and focused execution. The speed at which this project was realized is important. Consider: from the initial concept in late December of 2003 to assembling the computer in Madrid took less than a year. Normally, this kind of supercomputer projects take years.

    Lame!

    SGI had NASA AMES' Columbia online in 120 days, and landed #2 on the Top500.

    --
    Brandon D. Valentine
  4. Re:War in the age of information warfare by grozzie2 · · Score: 5, Informative
    These things are already being used by rogue states. The us military has a bunch of them dedicated to modelling nuclear events.

    With regard to denial of service attacks, there's a cluebox over in the corner, you need to go grab a couple out of the box. DOS attacks dont require a big computer, they require massive bandwidth with massive routing diversity available. The actual computer power required borders on insignificant. A supercomputer like this is useless for that kind of thing, by necessity, it will have an internal networking and communications environment, and likely only a relatively low speed interconnect to external networks.

    But look on the bright side, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every lamp post' reaction is just what the american government has been trying to instill in the population for the last few years. Your post here shows, it's been an effective campaign, money successfully spent, and the objective achieved. It's become the 'trendy' response to just about everything these days.