Not an iPad

There was a good "carpet" of clouds laying down on Boulder this morning, when I came around the hill and started my way down.

I had pretty much forgotten that I had a tour of our new supercomputer on my schedule this morning! A nice distraction for the morning routine, minus the fact that I couldn't take my coffee with me. Your tax dollars hard at work... this is a roughly $8m Dell supercomputer that intended for research on the University campus. There wasn't a building set for it to go into, so instead, it went into a custom made container, that sits in a parking lot - but at least it's out of the floodplain, unlike most of our equipment. It definitely doesn't look flashy from the outside;

The second row of four rows of racks;

1,348 nodes, each with 12 cores and the machine has a bit over a petaflop of memory. The racks are separated into cold and hot zones, the hot zones being contained inside these "rooms" and averaging about 150degrees, vs. 60 degrees for the cold.

Here is the mechanical chiller;

And a good portion of the passive chiller. The system has been running quite efficiently, at about 1.07 - 1.2 Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). Still, that's about $20k of electricity per month.

Now that's a pretty serious circuit box!

And this, of course, is the Mani-corn that sits outside and guards the supercomputer.