Today’s large-scale compute clusters take a lot of preparation for shipping. In this video, Cray employees prepare a supercomputer for shipment to Saudi Arabia. As reported here, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) selected a Cray XC40, a Cray Sonexion 2000 storage system, Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) and Cray’s Urika-GD graph analytics appliance.
Logistics planning for the KAUST shipment started months in advance, and it took 12 Cray personnel almost five days to prepare and pack the system. The KAUST shipment consisted of 184 boxes, weighed 127 tons, and filled an entire Boeing 747 airplane — plus part of another. Ten semi-trucks were required to transport Shaheen II from Cray’s manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, to the airport in Chicago.
