Comments on: Photos: IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer

Sixteen racks of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer can perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second.

[volterwd]

kind of ugly looking

id light some sleek stuff with night blue lights :P

4 heaps with 16 racks altogether with and 16 bays in each rack.

4 heaps with 4 racks in each heap making 16 racks altogether, with 16 bays in each rack making a 16 by 16 or 256 supercomputer.

IBM/Apple G5 Xserve is sweet!

Yeah, this looks kind of clunky & wired together considering it's
IBM. IBM/Apple G5 Xserve is much more clean, high tech &
modular.
check out www.apple.com/xserve

But, all in all, IBM still rocks!
-Eyes wide open in Seattle-

[kieranmullen]

What about server blades?

I hear so much about the annoying server blades on tv. If they are so great why dont they use them then?

KM

IBM Cabling

You would think such an important computer system, would have better cabling. Note the differences from rack to rack.

What cabling differences do you see?

BlueGene/L cabling is not completely symmetric - is that what you see as differences? I see a cable or two flagged (tagged) for some reason; that's normal in a laboratory environment prior to shipment to a customer site. The black, blue, white cables each have different purposes, and the black cables are color coded depending on specific use. I can see some of the red color bands in the second picture, at the centerpoint of the closest rack.

Oooo Oooo I know?

The black cables are inter-node and the blue cables pull data from storage they are tagged with the storage array location to which they are attached.

[baggyguy1218]

cool...

Could I use it when you guys are done? I have a level in Doom 3 I cant get past cause my computer keeps getting jittery and I get killed everytime. Let me know...Peace

[DionMarinos]

Come on I.B.M.
Get on the horn and start mapping out the 8 piece tablebases for chess :D
Man id love to analyze some chess positions on that thing.