Pictures from the Teraflop installation 10/11 2004

09:50: In the beginning there were only floorspace. This is also the view of the web-cam which had more than 750 visitors during the day. Sølvi is preparing the cables for what is about to come.

09:55: Last pep-talk before the action.

10:00: Rack one is installed by Roy, Maria and Steinar. Soon all the 49 HP rx4640 machines will be in place. Each node has 4 1,3 GHz Itanium2 processors and 4 GB of memory. Aggregated performance for the new cluster is 1,02 Teraflop. With the old equipment in addition it's a total of 1,16 Teraflop.

10:05: Eirik and Maria are getting the second rack. The chiefs wisely decide to keep their hands in their pockets. IT-director Magnar Antonsen to the left.

10:15: Eirik, Tor and Roy install rack three.

10:15: Steinar is mounting the front of the rack, while Sølvi handles the cables at the back. Eirik and Maria are ready to get going with the next rack.

10:20: Our biggest investor is paying us a visit. Tor looks really happy to see Santa. Maybe the last piece is in his sack? Roy on the other hand look anxious to get his hands on the gigabit switches on the table.

10:40: Roy is connecting the three Gigabit switches.

10:45: Maria is watching while Eirik and Sølvi get the networking in place. At this point the front-end infrastructure is about to be switched to the new networking equipment.

11:15: Roy is ready to "Rocks and Roll". Each node took about 15 minutes to upload with Rocks. By then it was completely installed with software and tools ready to be inserted into the compute-pool. Installation of Rocks was done in parallel as soon as the nodes were turned on. The white rack to the left is the old cluster. At the top seven rx2600's which will be returned to HP as part of the deal. At the bottom the two rx5670's (similar specs to the compute nodes) that are going to be reserved for interactive use in the future.

11:55: Svenn is posing in front of the cluster. He looks very satisfied. The first user job has just started on the new nodes. Steinar looks a bit more concerned in the background, one of the nodes did not boot "out of the box".

12:30: Maria scissorhand goes to work. Some of the labels obviously need to be changed. This is rack 3 which you can see in the other pictures has no machine installed at the top. Instead it has three gigabit switches mounted towards the back.

13:55: Sølvi and Maria celebrates 1 Teraflop up and running. Only three hours from now the system-load will reach staggering 73%.

14:30: The Teraflop cake is being consumed in parallel. From left: Eirik Fossgaard, Roy Dragseth, Steinar Trædal-Henden, Svenn Hanssen, Sølvi Bersås, Tor Johansen and Maria Wulff-Hauglann.

14:35: All the good helpers get their share. Jan Andreassen (cutting cake) and Martin Eilertsen were responsible for the web-cast. In the background Børge Brunes who had a hand in the networking part.

All pictures © by Lars Slettjord (UiT)

Also: Watch the video