Tour of NASA's Pleiades

With video, Shazam!  EETimes, yesterday, had the pleasure of attending the official launch of the Pleiades machine at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in Mountain View, CA.  Pleiades constitutes a major architecture shift away from its older sister, Columbia.  The shift from Itanium to Xeon, however, seems to be paying dividends already as it debuted at #3 on the Top500.

For those interested in all the nitty gritty details, here goes.  The SGI ICE-based system includes over 12,000 quad-core Intel Harpertown chips connected with one of the largest Infiniband fabrics in existence.  For the topology-aware in the audience, its a dual-plane 10-D hypercube.  That’s two independent 4X-DDR Infiniband host ports per node.  Twenty-one miles of Infiniband cables and roughly 100 cabinets later, you get Pleiades.

EETimes was also lucky enough to get a video interview with Robert [Bob] Ciotti, chief architect of NASA’s advanced systems facility.  You can view the three minute interview here.

For more info, read the full article here.