Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:40PM 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."

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Re:Beowulf cluster? by tomhudson · 2005-02-16 01:13 · Score: 3, Interesting

It makes you wonder where the limit currently is for if it is worth adding an extra node,
If you're the vendor, there is no limit. Every extra node == $$$
If you're the buyer, there is no limit. Every extra node == _MORE_STATUS_
If you're the guys writing code for it, there is no limit. Every extra node == job security++
If you're the people administering this, there is no limit. Every extra node == bigger budget next year
See, citizen? Size does count.