Albert: Sauber's F1 supercomputer Wind Tunnel: The comparatively
real-life testing of the wind tunnel goes hand in hand with research and
development carried out by Albert, Sauber's new supercomputer, which is
housed at the same plant and named after a rather well-known Swiss
scientific genius. Albert's specialist subject is CFD, or Computational
Fluid Dynamics. This is the science of predicting how even the smallest
changes in component shape, placement or movement will affect the
overall flow of air or fluids.

Building the big picture of how an F1 cars components all interact with
each other in terms of airflow is a mind-bendingly complex process. It
starts with CAD modelling, to generate several million tiny triangles
arranged in a mesh to represent the car itself. This expands to hundreds
of millions of triangles when you factor in the all-important air
movement around the car, which needs to be built into the equation. To
get a grip on airflow analysis, Albert is 30 times more powerful than
Sauber's previous supercomputer and a leader in the F1 field. Built by
DALCO at a cost of around $3 million(UK), the supercomputer uses 530 AMD
Opteron processors and runs Fluent CFD software on the Linux platform.

The 64-bit AMD Opteron was chosen for its Direct Connect Architecture,
and the fact that it includes onboard memory controllers to
significantly reduce latency, while enabling the fastest data throughput
from chip to chip and from chip to I/O, using HyperTransport technology.
It's parallel computing par excellence. Using Albert, designers can
build and test hundreds of components and complete cars in the virtual
realm, even seeing how tyre temperatures and hot exhaust gases affect
the aero package. They can then channel their resources into building
only the most promising parts for real testing in the wind tunnel and on
track.

Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of
power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed
up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage
space. Sauber says that to achieve the same computing performance that
Albert accomplishes in one second, the entire population of Zurich would
have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every second for a whole year.


Full Article: PCANSWERS Magazine March 2005

Ed wrote:

>
> Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of
> power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
> experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
> carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed
> up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage
> space. Sauber says that to achieve the same computing performance that
> Albert accomplishes in one second, the entire population of Zurich would
> have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every second for a whole year.
>
>
> Full Article: PCANSWERS Magazine March 2005

The weight is in the cooling system, I suspect.

RM

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
Robert Myers <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>Ed wrote:
>
>>
>> Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of
>> power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
>> experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
>> carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed
>> up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage
>> space. Sauber says that to achieve the same computing performance that
>> Albert accomplishes in one second, the entire population of Zurich would
>> have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every second for a whole year.
>>
>>
>> Full Article: PCANSWERS Magazine March 2005
>
>The weight is in the cooling system, I suspect.
>
>RM
>


10 is about 60 sq ft and 150 #/sq ft is heavy datacenter
floor loading 5 tons. Anything denser would require special
construction.

Power is a bug issue.

I suspect that the clueless reporter heard about 18 tons
of A/C and thought it was weight.

I don't feel like converting tons to kw right now.

--
a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don't blame me. I voted for Gore.

Ed wrote:
> Albert: Sauber's F1 supercomputer Wind Tunnel: The comparatively
> real-life testing of the wind tunnel goes hand in hand with research and
> development carried out by Albert, Sauber's new supercomputer, which is
> housed at the same plant and named after a rather well-known Swiss
> scientific genius. Albert's specialist subject is CFD, or Computational
> Fluid Dynamics. This is the science of predicting how even the smallest
> changes in component shape, placement or movement will affect the
> overall flow of air or fluids.

The wierd thing is that this system doesn't even show up in the Top500
list anymore, even among other Opteron computers, that have gotten so
fast these days.

http://www.top500.org/sublist/index....nerate+Sublist

or,

http://tinyurl.com/9fp9q

Yousuf Khan

>>> Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of

hmm, 150KW/530 cpus is >280W/cpu, which is just plain wrong
unless each node has an attached hair dryer. (100-150/cpu is right.)

>>> power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
>>> experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
>>> carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed

OK, so 2.2 GHz.

>>> up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage

2GB/p is fairly modest, as is 10TB disk.

> I suspect that the clueless reporter heard about 18 tons
> of A/C and thought it was weight.

> I don't feel like converting tons to kw right now.

3.5 KW/ton is pretty easy to remember, so that theory is wrong...

but 18 tons for 265 nodes and 10TB disk is not unreasonable.

Yousuf Khan wrote:
>
> The wierd thing is that this system doesn't even show up in the Top500
> list anymore, even among other Opteron computers, that have gotten so
> fast these days.
>
> http://www.top500.org/sublist/index....nerate+Sublist
>
> or,
>
> http://tinyurl.com/9fp9q
>

Why should anyone bother? It costs money. What's the return? There
are plenty of clusters out there for which no one ever bothers to run
linpack or to submit results.

RM