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."

Re:specifically

[Predflux]

Well, Mare Nostrum means "our sea". And which was the Roman's sea? The Mediterranean Sea.

Re:War in the age of information warfare

[WindBourne]

First and formost, that is NSA's directive; That is to secure our systems and networks.

Next there have been several CS security czars, but all have quit because they have not had the response from the admin that they thought was needed.

Will it take a terrorist hit to get us really thinking about all this? Nope. In spite of 9-11, we are still not really any more "secure" than we were on 9-10.

What it will take is lawsuits against companies. A good one that is going through now, is the one where a guy got ripped off for 90k using BOA. Now it was not BOA fault(they had a secured server). But they allowed that guy to use his system (he seems to forget the use at your own risk think in the EULA that he agreed to). Most likely, BOA will lose money no this. Then they will re-think through there strategy. It will probably be to check the client and browser and see if it is known high risk (hummmm, which OS and browser are very high risk, hummm). At which time, they will warn the user and perhaps suggest another browser (and maybe an OS or 2). At the point that this costs institiions money is when they will take it serious.

No memory specs?

[PornMaster]

Am I the only one finding it curious that nowhere in the specs do they mention how much RAM there is per node or in the aggregate?

It mentions how many nodes, how many CPUs, how many racks, how much storage, but not how much RAM.

Re:Beowulf cluster?

[tomhudson]

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.

CELL Supercomputer

[Omegalomaniac]

The scary thing is, that the CELL with its potential for 25 GFlops of double precision floating point, could rival this system with just 1600 8 SPE units.

Granted, the CELL isn't exactly off the shelf, and I'm willing to bet 4,564 970FXs will be cheaper than 1600 CELLs for quite some time, so the project still has merit.