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A row of Regatta-H Turbo frames in the IBM bluesky system
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On Friday, 2 October 2002, SCD took delivery of Phase 2 of NCAR's Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS). The delivery adds a complete new IBM system, called bluesky, to the SCD computational environment.
On 4 October at 1440 Mountain Daylight Time, SCD powered up bluesky:
http://www.scd.ucar.edu/news/02/fotoweek/1004.powerup.html
IBM engineers worked over the weekend to address power and hardware issues caused by the move and the install.
The bluesky system has a peak computational capacity exceeding 6.3 teraflops and 21 terabytes of disk. Combined with blackforest and other SCD supercomputers, bluesky brings the total peak computation capacity of NCAR's supercomputing facility to nearly 9 teraflops.
The bluesky system introduces IBM's next-generation POWER4 processor. As with the POWER3-II processors in blackforest, the POWER4 has a capability of 4 floating point operations per clock tick; but the POWER4 runs at a substantially faster clock speed of 1.3 gigahertz. Thus each POWER4 processor has a peak computation rate of 5.2 gigaflops.
The bluesky system is comprised of 38 Regatta-H Turbo frames, each with 32 POWER4 processors. Thus the bluesky system has a total of 1216 POWER4 processors and peak computation rate of 6.323 teraflops.
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