Oh my I'm in geek heaven - I got a tour of some of IBM's more expensive toys this morning including a close up look at a BlueGene server, for those of you who think your dual processor home PC is pretty snazzy this puppy has 32 cores on each of its 32 mainboards, crammed into a box not much bigger than a people mover. They've got a couple of these things lying about but not enough to get to the maximum you can stick together to form one computer which is 64 of them, so that's 32*32*64 cores = 65536. Each one of these boxes does around 12 tera flops but before you run out to place your order there are two things to consider, each one of these requires a lot of power - domestic power supplies just aren't going to cut it, you're going to need a dedicated sub-station, the other is cooling - I'm not even going to describe the noise of the room we went into but apparently most of the noise was the air-con as well as the the huge fans in the cabinets.
I've stopped dribbling now.
1 comment:
That was so geeky it felt like you were speaking in another language! The only thing I understood was "people mover" and "air con"!
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