coreyshields.com

Last week I was in Poughkeepsie, New York at a meeting of large-scale IBM cluster customers. I would have posted updates through the week but the internet connection there was horrid.

The meeting was good, I picked up a couple of ideas and methods that other sites use to manage their systems, made some good contacts, and ate some great food at the Culinary Institute of America.

A couple of highlights were getting to tour IBM's 300mm chip fabrication facility (where a lot of next-gen game consoles are getting their processors nowadays). Had to wear a bunny suit since it was a clean room facility. It was a bit disturbing that the bunny suit was more protective than what I had to wear in the surgery room for Nicole's c-sections. One guy offered his iphone to take a pic of the group, and the lady who took the picture must have pushed the button instead of the "take picture" icon on the screen, and so we didn't get a picture in the end. que sera, sera. The facility was amazing, robots moving everywhere and insane automation.

We also visited the data center where they are assembling and testing the new RoadRunner supercomputer cluster before it is sent to Los Alamos National Labs. This cluster will be the first Petaflop computing cluster, comprised of tens of thousands of processors. The size of this cluster was mind-boggling. I did a rough count on their floor plan and there were around 250 racks full of systems. In comparison, the system I work on, BigRed, is 20 racks and clocks in at about 40 teraflops. This makes RoadRunner 25x more powerful and about 12x larger in physical size. I got a headache just trying to comprehend managing this beast.

Back now, swimming through a pile of email from the holiday weekend.