“Big Red” – The World’s Fastest University Supercomputer
Update 5/29/07 @ 9:48 p.m.: For more pics and updates on Big Red, see my new post here.
You can hear the hum of electricity as you approach. As you enter the room that houses the computer the sound of the water-cooled fans that keep this beast of a machine at a reasonable operating temperature are reminiscent of a jet taking off.
Big Red is one of the largest IBM e1350 systems in the world, with a peak theoretical capability of 20.4 trillion mathematical operations per second. Note: A single dual-core Pentium D is capable of 1,397 Mops (millions of operations per second). It contains a total of 1024 dual-core IBM PowerPC 970 MP chips. Each chip has two floating point processor elements, one vector processor per chip, and runs at a clock rate of 2.5GHz. Big Red is made up of 512 JS21 Blade servers, each of which contains two IBM dual-core PowerPC 970MP processors and 8GB of RAM (for a system total of 4TB). The JS21 Blade servers have Ethernet and Myrinet2000 interconnects (high data-rate, low latency). At the time of implementation Big Red was number 23 on the Fastest Supercomputers list and #1 among universities.
My contacts tell me that this configuration has been recently doubled, which, theoretically, should double all of the figures above. On the Big Red info page is says, “Expansion Activities Completed” but little else.
Indiana University, home to Big Red, constantly ranks among the “Top Wired” campuses in the nation. I spent 3 1/2 years there studying computer science and have to say that the budget for computing at IU seems endless. They are on an approximately 3-year upgrade cycle. Just think about that for a second…from registration as a freshman to graduation all of the computers at IU will have been upgraded (approximately). A majority of their computer systems are enclosed in a nondescript building that shows no signs of housing some of the most powerful computing equipment in the world.
