[An interesting day at ILUG-Chennai. Those who remember Anand Babu would also 
find this intereting ;) - Sandip]

http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2004-July/011279.html

Talk    : Taste the THUNDER

Speaker : Mr Anand Babu <ab at gnu.org.in>,
          VP CDC, USA & Member, FSF-I.

Date    : Sat Jul 17 17:00 IST 2004
Venue   : ADI-TeNeT Seminar Hall, CSD 320, ESB, IIT-Madras.

The  super-computer code  named  THUNDER was  built  was for  Lawrence
Livermore  National Labs  (http://www.llnl.gov) by  California Digital
Corporation, USA. It has 4096  Itanium2 64 bit Processors, 8TB of RAM,
Quadrics Interconnect and runs GNU/Linux. Code named "Thunder", with a
performance of  20 trillion floating  point operations per  second, it
has been ranked second in the  TOP500 list of the worlds most powerful
supercomputers    maintained   at   http://www.top500.org/list/2004/06
Anand Babu,  a  full-time  free software developer is a core developer
behind THUNDER, who ensured that all the software he wrote for Thunder
was released under GNU GPL.

[...]

AB was  briefly introduced,  and immediately, AB  started the  talk on
THUNDER with a  torrent of information about the  harware and firmware
that make up the THUNDER  super-computer, which is in fact an assembly
of 1000  individual interconnected computers sans  screen, keyboard or
mouse.  Each mother board  has four Itanium2 processors, advanced bmc,
sensors  and each  system  is  connected to  the  other with  Quadrics
interconnect.   Hardware  errors are  handled  with  a  great deal  of
sophistication.  Each of the 1000  serial ports are connected to a hub
called calypso. With FreeIPMI, and  a collection of other tools, it is
possible to configure  even the bios of all the  1000 computers with a
single command or even address a specific machine using its IP address
from a single node.  Essentially, the network is automated, and manual
tasks are minimal  that could be taken care by a  single sys admin, to
whom to the super-computer appears as a single file system.
[...]



[Lots more at the link. Do check - Sandip]

- Sandip


-- 
Sandip Bhattacharya
sandip (at) puroga.com
Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Work: http://www.puroga.com        Home: http://www.sandipb.net

GPG: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3


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