Roxette and Lucidor
Roxette and Lucidor (and also the later Lenngren system) were Linux supercomputers that were significant in the evolution of systems at PDC as none of them were proprietary systems, that is they were built by the supplier to meet requirements from PDC rather than being bought as off-the-rack systems.
Roxette
Roxette was the first Linux system at PDC - it was essentially a prototype proof-of-concept system for the larger Lucidor system that was installed at PDC in 2003. Both Lucidor and the Lenngren system that followed Lucidor were much the same as Roxette in terms of technology, just bigger and faster.
The Roxette system was installed in 1999 and had 15 Intel Pentium PIII-866 PC nodes and could be used as either an 8 or 15 node system. At that time, high-performance computing (HPC) clusters that were essentially “homemade” from personal computers (PCs) were known as “Pile-Of-PC” or “POP” for short. The system was named after the Swedish pop rock group Roxette (since it was “POP” compared to Swedish classics such as August Strindberg).
Lucidor
In 2003, a Linux system was installed at PDC to replace the Power2 and PowerPC parts of the earlier Strindberg system. The new system was a Hewlett Packard Intel 6000 rx2600 Itanium2 900 MHz cluster composed of 90 dual-processor nodes for a total of 180 processors. The 900 MHz 64-bit processors provided 7.2 GFLOPS per node for a total of 640 GFLOPS. There were 6 GB of memory per node for a total of 540 GB. A Myricom interconnect provided a high performance internal network. The sysem came 186th in the June 2003 Top500 list . The system was later upgraded and known as Lucidor II.
The system was named Lucidor after the pen name of Lars Johansson , a Swedish baroque poet.
