A Look Inside the NCSA

Peter Kern writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the great supercomputing facilities in the world and is home to 'Abe', one of the top 10 supercomputers on the current Top 500 list. TG Daily recently toured the facility and published a stunning report about their computing capabilities (more than 140 teraflops), power requirements (a sustained 1.7 megawatts), enormous 20-ft chillers in four cooling systems and other installations that keep the NCSA online."

Job requirements...

[ushering05401]

Just out of curiosity... does anyone know minimum requirements for getting on as a server tech in a place like that?

Really contemplating computing power like they describe is a pretty far out exercise for a small time programmer like me... What sort of people get employed at these places?

Regards.

Fire Protection System

[BlueLightSpecial]

Is there some way to perform a graceful shutdown before the water gets pumped and released? If the supercomputers are still on when the water is discharged from the pipes, wouldnt that damage the systems? If they dont want to use halon why not use a more computer-friendly compound like FM-200 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-200/ [wikipedia.org])

6 hour runs?

[Vellmont]

The most surprising thing in the article was how inelegantly they've solved the problem with inevitable hardware failure. That is, limiting runs to only 6 hours. It seems like there just HAS to be a better way to handle the problem than this! Virtualization sounds a bit tricky, so why not just write the software to handle hardware errors in the first place? I.e. produce results, check to see if there was a hardware failure, if so, re-do.

Maybe they already do this, and the reporter didn't catch it. But it'd surprise me if they didn't have better solutions than just hoping nothing bad happens during a run.