ExtremeTech

I don’t know about you, but unboxing new gadgets gets me pretty excited. For me, it’s knowing that soon — very soon now, after I cut through the bubble wrap or peel back the protective plastic — the device will burst into life for the very first time. If I’m honest, it actually makes me feel like Frankenstein breathing life into his monster for the first time — especially when I unbox a bunch of components and build them into a new PC. What, then, must it feel like to unbox a brand new petascale supercomputer? Recently, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia received a new Cray XC30 supercomputer, dubbed Magnus2. Remarkably, unboxing an XC30 is basically just like unboxing a new computer — just on a much larger scale. As you can see in the photos above and below, the Pawsey engineers basically just cracked open a bunch of crates, wired them up, and voila: a supercomputer with more than 35,000 Xeon cores and peak performance of around 1 petaflop. Cray has previously said that the XC30, with its Aries interconnect, is technically capable of scaling to 100 petaflops or more. Read more at http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187387-whats-it-like-to-unbox-a-supercomputer-surprisingly-just-like-unboxing-a-normal-pc. View the installation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Y77efFW-I#t=86.