Stampede2 |
We not only got to view Stampede2 from behind the glass, we actually got to walk down one if it's "hot aisles", or an aisle with all the backs of the machines facing in. It's "hot" because the cooling system blows cold air on the fronts of all the racks. The air becomes hot by the time it arrives at the back of the cabinets. Stampede2 takes up five and a half rows. Looking in from the back of the machine, we were able to see this rack full of Intel (R) Omni-Path switches and cabling. These specialized switches and cabling enable all of the chips in the Stampede2 cluster to communicate more quickly than over standard switches and cabling.
Omni-Path switches and cabling |
Lest you think that this is all one big advertisement for Intel HPC products, we did see several other clusters, including ones with AMD and Nvidia chips. Strange but I seemed to have forgotten to take pictures of those...
The last cluster we viewed is a collaboration between a Japanese corporation, a Japanese government agency and TACC. It is an experiment to see if a super computer can be powered by solar. The solar panels are installed as a carport in the parking lot. Unfortunately, current solar panel technology doesn't provide enough power to run a super computer, even a smaller cluster like Hikari.
Checking out the solar versus grid powering Hikari |
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