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A Look Inside the NCSA
Peter Kern writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the great supercomputing facilities in the world and is home to 'Abe', one of the top 10 supercomputers on the current Top 500 list. TG Daily recently toured the facility and published a stunning report about their computing capabilities (more than 140 teraflops), power requirements (a sustained 1.7 megawatts), enormous 20-ft chillers in four cooling systems and other installations that keep the NCSA online."
the water isn't getting pumped all over the motherboards of these computers or something drastic like that. What they mean is that they keep super-chilled water on hand at all times. This way, should there be some catastrophic over-heating event, they have already cold water on hand; not the stuff that most liquid cooling systems use (which is just room temperature).
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I'd make sure I had ample experience in the systems and networking administration arenas. Know multiple flavors of UNIX, know Linux, and know multiple clustering technologies -- everything from shared-memory architectures to high performance clustering to grid computing to high availability systems. Know the systems available from multiple vendors -- IBM, HP, Sun, Red Hat, Veritas. Knowing storage area networking is pretty smart also. Know networks -- understand them at all levels in the OSI and TCP/IP models. Understand application and system-level debugging. Understand how to analyze the performance of a complete system, from the application level all the way to the lowest levels of an individual node.
Oh, and being able to think on your feet, the ability to communicate with engineers and scientists, and being very organized and able to work independently doesn't hurt either.
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Yes, Abe uses Lustre. As the other commenter suggested, GPFS is also in use.