ACADEMIA

System X has a new Website with gallery pictures. Visit: http://www.tcf.vt.edu/ . System X was conceived in February 2003 by a team of Virginia Tech faculty and administrators and represents what can happen when the academic and IT organizations collaborate. Working closely with vendor partners, the Terascale Core Team went from drawing board to reality in little more than 90 days! Building renovations, custom racks, and a lot of volunteer labor had to be organized and managed in a very tight timeline. Construction went on for 6 weeks, 7 days a week and for upwards of 20 hours a day to meet the facilities deadline. In parallel, device drivers were written, hand optimization of numerical libraries, and a lot of code porting and development were going. Behind the scenes, phone calls, emergency trips, and hundreds of emails were coordinating the efforts and keeping the project on track. An army of undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, administrators, university IT staff, and just people who wanted to help descended on the information systems building and helped them process 1100 Power Mac G5s into the racks. Armed with screw drivers (and a cool new t-shirt) and fueled by pizza, these enthusiastic volunteers did some amazing things. They had to boot, shutdown, open, install, close, and then boot again each system they received to check to make sure they worked before they racked them. With a crew of about 30 they processed 234 machines from truck to rack in less than 2 hours! On September 23, 2003 they turned it all on and began the arduous process of stabilizing and benchmarking this machine. After many more sleepless nights and countless grams of caffeine they finally reached the 10 teraflop goal. Well with the concept proven they now had to make sure they had a system capable of conducting scientific computation. They needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming. So in January they tore the system down and started prepping for the XServes. And now they're here and they have a final system. The best is yet to come. System X Specifications: Nodes 1100 Apple XServe G5 dual processor cluster nodes (4 GB RAM, 80 GB S-ATA HD) Primary Communication 24 Mellanox 96 port InfiniBand switches (4X InfiniBand, 10 Gbps) Secondary Communication 6 Cisco 4506 Gigabit Ethernet switches Cooling Liebert X-treme Density System cooling Software Mac OS X, MVAPICH, XLC & XLF