I noticed this post about Munich’s new LRZ supercomputer in Garching on Moritz Angermann’s blog. Looking at this photo (webcam apparently, so maybe you can only see it in the daylight), there’s something faintly absurd about it. Apparently this big cube building (at the right) is the computer, or can be perceived as the computer because it’s dealt with remotely. This might be a picture of the inside, but I’d still rather think of the building as the computer. It’s just a very big computer, you see.
I’ve never been to Garching, but I keep meeting clever people who work there.
Yep, thats supposedly the inside. I’ve been in there only before the altix was installed.
Note that the building also houses other stuff such as huge tape libraries and tons of other servers.
The supercomputer is on the top floor.
All the tech stuff (power supply, fire extinguishing systems, cooling, …) is quite fascinating.
http://www.zdnet.de/itmanager/tech/0,39023442,39145507,00.htm
This site has a couple more images of the building.
Altix, now there is a platform that I would certainly want to install because the company who provides it is likely to remain solvent in the near future. AUD$10000 per CPU… I’m almost positive there has to be better ways to spend your money, fancy highspeed interconnects or not.