The most beautiful supercomputer in the world

[doggdot news] I'm not talking about Ranger, the Sun company's supercomputer produced in Texas with a capacity of 500 trillion operations per second,

I have an artistic perspective on supercomputers and tend to appreciate them beforehand. When I saw the supercomputer MareNostrum, I was deeply attracted. It is now the largest in Europe and the ninth largest in the world, installed last week at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Wow!

It looks so beautiful, especially when you see it up close. Below are some silhouettes:

 MareNostrum needs four cabinets just to store all the interconnected cables. It uses a special technique to reduce the number of cables. However, with 12 independent switch elements, it still requires a large amount of cabling. More cables mean more connectors, increasing the likelihood of failure. Each network node requires one cable, which is a typical series configuration. The more cables, the more nodes.

Compared to the Constellation computer from Sun that uses an overly dense InfiniBand switch system theory approach, this network node adopts another bundling method. This complex management approach provides support for the next generation of computing systems.

If you want to learn more about Constellation, including some interesting charts, you can refer to Jonathan's blog.