On National Petascale Day (October 15) the University of Illinois Blue Waters Super Computer was opened to the public for limited tours. I thought I would share the pictures I took there that day. Apologies all of these pictures were taken with an iPhone 5.
Upon entering the second floor of the facility where the computing center lies, one is greeted with digital signage, and framed images of discoveries made possible by Super Computing:
From that same room, one can see through a window into the Control Center:
There is also a window into the main datacenter. Here we could see a few of the pods that house the Cray compute nodes:
After leaving the welcome area, we were guided down a long hallway that housed multiple battery systems on the left side of the hallway:
Environmental and fire controls were located on the right side of that same hallway:
At the very end of the hallway were master power services for the cooling towers:
The hallway led to the entrance to the large datacenter. Closest to the entrance were the testing racks and a small build station:
Along the way the tour guide opened up their raised floor. The raised floor at Blue Waters is 7 feet deep.
We were then shown one of the Cray compute nodes. These nodes have eight Opteron processors, and four banks of 64GB of memory, with two Cray Gemini interconnects per node running the fabric that binds all of the nodes together.
Cray Compute Node up close:
We were then allowed to take pictures and look at the system from a distance.
Tapefinity Tape Backup System:
Enjoy!
