“The ETH Zuerich has installed a large Linux cluster that
will be expanded later this month to 500 processors, 250 Gbyte of
memory and 2 Tbyte of data. Because the machine is worth more
that 1.5 million Swiss Francs, European regulations require an open
tender that has to adhere to strict rules. So who won this tender?
One of the big supercomputer companies you would assume. Not so, a
small Swiss company Dalco employing 8 people but with a yearly
turnover in the 10 million Franc range, solved the legal issues,
the technical problems, convinced the ETH they could do the job,
and offered the lowest price. Hence the cluster, called Asgard, was
installed by the company of Christian and Francois Dallman. The
cluster runs Linux, provided by SuSe which has a number of
additional tools for running a cluster and supporting parallel
programmes.”
“Matthias Troyer, from the ETH Zuerich, explained the whole
acquisition process at the Supercomputer 2000 Conference in
Mannheim. At the Physics Department in Zuerich, they are used to
using a lot of computing power. Troyer also stayed for a longer
period in Japan, where he had access to one of the largest
supercomputers in the world, a Hitachi machine. Being used to have
supercomputer access, he learned, when coming back to Zuerich, that
the ETH planned to shut down the old Paragon parallel supercomputer
they where still operating and had no plans for replacement.
However, the ETH computer centre would support users when buying
their own machines, as much as possible.”