Cory's Jerry Rigged

Like Craig, I'm a computer babysitter. My jerry-rigged computer is a little bit bigger than his though - at one time it was the third fastest in the world, but it looks like it slipped down to eight place last week. What we see above is just a little part of it, but it is the most crazily rigged part of all.

Big computers are like hotrods - they're designed for speed and tend to require a lot of care to keep them in working condition. The rack in my picture here is one of many that serves up storage to Intrepid. In total we have about 8 petabytes of disk that is directly connected to 128 file servers via Infiniband. Those file servers are then connected to each other and the rest of the machine with a (rather unreliable) 10GB network. Finally, the rest of the machine has its own internal interconnect for its own communication. On top of all of this runs a pretty good parallel filesystem that prefers reliable networks. It is a crazy jerry-rigged pile of spaghetti to keep running.

In lay terms, we have 8 mayonnaise jars connected to a pile of pizza boxes with zip ties. There is clothes line holding all of the pizza boxes together, some string with tin cans on both ends keeps them connected to a row of port-a-potties. The port-a-potties are held together by baling wire, and the whole thing lives in a room with a GIANT window unit air conditioner.