Aliens?|Allt mellan himmel och jord|Forum|Nordichardware

cancer-forskning är ett klart vettigt projekt. Kanske mer behjärtansvärt än SETI faktiskt. Dock är det svårt för många som kört SETI ett tag att bara hoppa över till något annat.
Men om det finns intresse för det så kan vi köra både och =)

Ganska lagom ramminne där .. med 10 TByte kan man har ganksa många applikationer igång samtidigt 😮

The Earth Simulator (ES) is a project of Japanese agencies NASDA, JAERI and JAMSTEC to develop a 40 TFLOPS system for climate modeling.

The ES site is a new location in an industrial area of Yokohama, an hour drive west of Tokyo. The facility became operational in late 2001, and claimed first spot in current Top 500 list. In spite of a public 5-year development period leading to that event, the US supercomputing community was caught by surprise.

Hardware

The ES is based on:

5,120 (640 8-way nodes) 500 MHz NEC CPUs
8 GFLOPS per CPU (41 TFLOPS total)
2 GB (4 512 MB FPLRAM modules) per CPU (10 TB total)
shared memory inside the node
640 × 640 crossbar switch between the nodes
16 GB/s inter-node bandwidth
20 kVA power consumption per node

The vector CPU is made using 0.15 μm CMOS process, and is a descendant (same speed, smaller process) of the NEC SX-5 CPU. The machine runs a version of the Super-UX UNIX-based OS. OpenMP parallel directives are used within a node, and MPI-2 or HPF must be used across multiple nodes, necessitating a dual-level parallel implementation. In fact this can be considered a three-level parallel system, if single-CPU vectorization is taken into account; however, vectorization is largely automatic. Still, an optimized code will need to employ MPI-2 at the subdomain level, OpenMP at the loop level, and vectorization directives at the instruction level all at once.

Physical

The CPUs are housed in 320 cabinets, 2 8-CPU nodes per cabinet. The cabinets (blue) are organized in a ring around the interconnect, which is housed in another 65 cabinets (green). Another layer of the circle is formed by disk array cabinets (white). The whole thing occupies a building 65 m long and 50 m wide. Activity on the nodes is signalled by a bright green beacon at the top of the cabinet, and if a fault occurs, a similar red light turns on. Switch cabinets also have green and red signaling lights for various types of communication events.

The machine room sits at approximately 4th floor level. The 3rd floor level is taken by hundreds of kilometers of copper cabling, and the lower floors house the air conditioning and electrical equipment. The structure is enclosed in a cooling shell, with the air pumped from underneath through the cabinets, and collected to the two long sides of the building. The aeroshell gives the building its "pumped-up" appearance. The machine room is electromagnetically shielded to prevent interference from nearby expressway and rail. Even the halogen light sources are outside the shield, and the light is distributed by a grid of scattering pipes under the ceiling. The entire structure is mechanically isolated from the surroundings, suspended in order to make it less prone to earthquake damage. All attachments (power, cooling, access walkways) are flexible.