“You’ve built a large cluster of machines on a relatively
pea-sized budget. Are other government agencies going to duplicate
your work? Have they already? If so, for what purposes?”
“Greg:
There are a lot of government agencies building large clusters,
such as the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Lab, which has
the 800+ processor CPlant cluster today, with another 1,400
processors on the way. Like FSL, they use their cluster for
scientific computing. The well-known Beowulf clusters started
within NASA, another U.S. government agency.”
“However, the Forecast Systems Lab (FSL) system is a bit
different from these other clusters: it’s intended to be a
production-quality “turn key” supercomputer, and it contains all
the things supercomputer users are used to, such as a huge robotic
tape storage unit (70 terabytes of tapes), and a fast disk
subsystem (a bandwidth of 200 megabytes/second.) The FSL
system is also much more reliable than your average cluster — in
its first three months of operation, it was up 99.9% of the time.
During that time we had quite a few hardware failures (due to a
power supply problems), but no work was lost, because of our
fault-tolerant software.”