Can a parking lot be transformed into a high-performance computing cluster in three months? That’s what happened last year at the University of Colorado, which used a custom-built modular data center from Dell to deploy the Janus supercomputer, a 184 teraflop cluster on its Boulder campus. The system features 16,416 total cores in 1,368 nodes, housed in 342 chassis with four nodes apiece. Janus has about 800 teraybtes of high-performance storage in a Lustre file system. The project demonstrates how modular deployments can quickly add capacity for high-density computing requirements. Scientist and researchers from the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will use the new cluster to research atmospheric chemistry, climate, cloud physics and storms, weather hazards to aviation, and interactions between the sun and Earth. This video from the University of Colorado shows the assembly of the supercomputer and Dell modular unit which houses it.
Hat tip to Inside HPC for pointing us to this video. For more news coverage of supercomputing, visit our High-Performance Computing channel. For additional videos, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.