Timo (my visiting student from Germany) and me are pretty much living in the UITS data-center (Wrubel building) these days. It’s a rather nice serverroom and we’re having our cluster directly next to the Data Capacitor and Big Red.
It was nice the last days, we stayed overnight during the weekend (more than 16 hours a day where others celebrated Halloween) and some nights during last week. Prof. Lumsdaine was so generous to buy us pizza at night.Thanks a lot!
The fun fact is the some caperpillar ran over a huge power transformer yesterday and cut off a part of the power supply to the building.The immediate results was that they had to switch off the air conditioning and some systems (Big Red was among them). It was rather funny to be in a really big data-center without air conditioning. It got hotter literally every hour, I guess it reached about 30-35 degrees at the end (we were sweating while just sitting there). The biggest problem was that we did power measurements but our system used 0.3-0.4 A more power than usual :-(. And we don’t know if it is linear :-/. We still ran some benchmarks. Anyway, the power and cold air came back around 2am. The IU physical plant people were really quick in getting a new transformer from Cincinnatti by truck (in less than 6 hours).
We then tried to get some food at Wednesday night 2:30am … man, all pizza places were closed. So we decided to drive to Taco Bell and have a “fourth meal”. So paked next to it and tried to walk into the restaurant – but it was locked. Ok, the drive-in was still open (how weird). Shortly after we left, the police stopped us and asked us if we had gasoline in the car (what a *really stupid questions* – no, our car is running with hydrogen … man, those people). Anyway, we realized that they were searching for a firebug and the Taco Bell people told them that we were suspicious. WTF! Again, man, those people.
Cluster Challenge is really fun again. I’m happy that Guido and Jupp are here to help us. It’s getting really close but our system is really nice ;).