Comments on: A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 09:39:05 +0000

In reply to pallgone. @pallgone: The focus of the article is on hardware, that's why there isn't any information on the OS.

By: pallgone

pallgone — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 07:35:05 +0000

So another supercomputer article without any reference to the operating system. If it would run Windows I bet you would let us know all over the place.
And no, it doesn’t run a “stripped down version of Linux” but “SuSE Linux Enterprise (SLES 10)”
91% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux today (www.top500.org)

By: Oystein

Oystein — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:07:19 +0000

The BlueGene (L and P) was actually upgraded a couple of times. Increased the speed 700 to 850 if remember correctly, and also double the ram from 500MB to 1GB and then to 2GB.
The cooling is actually just regular server room cooling. (Most other super computers need liquid cooling. Check out the Earth simulator…) The cpu speed was limited for cooling purposes.
The blueGene is not very good for applications like SETI@Home since SETI@HOME is embarrassingly parallel and requires no inter-processor communication during processing. BlueGene is designed with a very fast network that makes it more suitable for more complex applications.

By: steven

steven — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:00:17 +0000

i would like to play a game of chess against this machine.

By: nathan

nathan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:12:23 +0000

wow….IBM server rules..

By: Honest Billy

Honest Billy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:06:26 +0000

In answer to the distro question. It runs it’s own stripped down version of linux. After all it would a shame if kde crashed it.
O to all those pointing out how it could be better. You might want to read about in other sources as to why it is as it is. The hardware is configured for a certain class of experiments. Distributed computing will be better for some situations but not all programs can be broke up this way without huge overheads being introduced.

By: CharlF

CharlF — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:05:54 +0000

I think You CAN run Crysis on it, It doesnt a big Video Card, It can just cache everything through the normal ram.
No worries :-p

By: dmilith

dmilith — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:28:20 +0000

On what Linux distro it’s running on?

By: Diego Viola

Diego Viola — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:04:51 +0000

Nice, and it runs Linux, the best OS in the world.

By: delo

delo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:31:01 +0000

Stupid – I just read here a lot of nonsense…
Does it will play Crysis, does it will play Doom… does it run Windows?
Come on dudes, are you really that stupid? Do you really think they will play shitty games on it – wasting horrible expensive time? It is for high troughput computing projects, like the well known SETI-Project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) for example, or for one of such projects like the world grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/) have to offer.
And honestly what the hell do you want with such a cluster?