SC09 talk bits

I’ll be giving a talk at SC09 about the design and installation of our new siCluster (storage cluster) product. The talk is entitled “Feeding the hungry Gopher”. I’ll explain that in a moment. It is Tuesday, November 17th, 3-3:30pm, at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute booth. The gopher is the mascot of the University of Minnesota. The hungry gopher(s) are, in this case, the 1000+ nodes of their new HP cluster named Itasca. From Mary Schwalm’s photojournalism site, there is a picture …

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](http://maryschwalm.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/goldy/)

Now imagine 8 cores per node, and 1000 nodes of those critters, hungrily munching data. My preliminary title was “Feeding the Beast”, but Itasca isn’t a beast. Its a very nice (fairly compact) water cooled system. It really is 1000 small, hungry machines. This will be a fun machine to run on. Assuming about 45 GF/node, this is an about 0.5 PFLOP machine. This is a serious bit of hardware. Getting data to and from the compute nodes in a reasonable time requires a very powerful IO design and implementation. That is what I’ll be talking about. And yes, you are going to be hearing more about siCluster. Oh yes. Definitely.