Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer

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."

Comments

Humans are so behind the curve

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

It's all fine

[Anonymous Coward]

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

War in the age of information warfare

[flopsy mopsalon]

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.

Re:War in the age of information warfare

[grozzie2]

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.

timely and focused PR

[bandix]

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.

Sounds like

[jim_v2000]

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...