Snowstorm Teraflop upgrade

Teraflop Cluster installed in Tromsø

10.11.2004

At 14:00 on Wednesday November 10th, Norway`s first 64-bit Teraflop cluster was installed at the University of Tromsø.
In less than 4 hours the HPC-group at UiT had upgraded the system from 100 Gigaflop to 1 Teraflop. The installation was broadcasted live on the Internet, and was watched by over 750 people. 3 hours later the system load was 73%, with 45 jobs spanning 158 processors. The largest job was a 16 processor chemistry application (dirac).		"that is such great news. what you describe is the scenario which we have designed the software for. i'm so pleased that rocks delivered on the promisee" Greg Bruno (SDSC)

Eirik, Roy, Steinar, Svenn, Sølvi, Tor, and Maria celebrates the first Teraflop (Photo by: Lars Slettjord, UiT)

The new Snowstorm-cluster is an HP Itanium2-cluster delivered by IT-partner Tromsø and HP Norway. With the use of the award winning Rocks management toolkit, the existing 22 processor cluster was upgraded to 204 processors without taking down the system. The Rocks cluster management tool allows you to add new HW to the cluster on the fly - without any downtime.

Technical Details

The installation process step-by-step

LIVE Snowstorm cluster report

LIVE Web-cast (playback)

Pictures from the installation

Press release (pdf, in Norwegian)

Press coverage (in norwegian):

• Competing in the world of Science (31/12 Public Service Review: Nordic States Winter 2004)
  
• Norways first Teraflop cluster installed at U of Tromso (26/11 HPC Wire)
  
• Spiste kake for tungregning (12/11 Computerworld)
  
• Universitetets megamaskin (11/11 Avisa Tromsø)
  
• Terastorm i Tromsø (10/11 IT-avisen)
  
• Tromsø med landets største tungregneanlegg (10/11 Nordlys)
  
• Tromsøs teraflop (10/11 Teknisk ukeblad)
  
• Tromsø bygger Teraflops-klynge (10/11 digi.no)
  
• Bygger tungregnemaskin for åpent kamera (9/11 Computerworld)