CHiC’n Run

I’m leaving tomorrow for the states again. The CHiC cluster project at TU Chemnitz that I have been involved in has been finished so far. We spent 2.64 Mio EUR (+ 1.5 Mio for the room construction) and got a 538 Node Dual Opteron (Dual Core, 2152 cores) system with a full bisectional bandwidth InfiniBand network. It reaches 8 TFLOPS Linpack and 11 Peak (this would make No. 82 in the top500, but we missed the deadline) and has 60 TByte disk space with 3.5 GB/s. It is also interesting to mention that the whole system is water cooled with a micro-climate inside every single rack. Many people have been involved in the design and construction of this system. Prof. Rehm was chair of the committee, Jens was mainly involved in the call for bids and Jochen … hmm, nobody knows what he did. I’ve been a member of the technical design team that consisted of Frank, Torsten (another one) and me. Frank and Torsten held the main resposibility for the whole system and the construction work. I was mainly involved in the design (meetings, discussions) and I was responsible for the IB network.

We made some group photos of us to keep the rememberance (note our corporate identity chic T-shirts – all credits for this go to Frank (holds the copyright of the image ;)) and Torsten!).

Torsten, me and Frank in front of the racks.

Me trying to destroy the core switch ;). Note the 288 InfiniBand cables that Frank had to fight with regularly.

It’s not too tidy ;). More than 5000 cables have been deployed in this system.

The compute nodes.

Me – still trying to destroy the core switch 😉

our group

posing with a rack (yes, that’s my hair getting sucked in)!