In October 2014 PDC is taking delivery of the most powerful supercomputer to date for academic research in the Nordic countries. The system is a Cray XC40 named Beskow after the well-known Swedish children's author and illustrator, Elsa Beskow. The new system has a peak performance close to two petaflops, making it over six times faster than PDC’s previous flagship system, Lindgren. After the installation of the system in October (which you can see documented in photos below), there will be a period of preliminary testing, with public access for research purposes expected to be available from the 5th of January 2015. Selected user groups will be invited to test the system earlier, most likely starting towards the middle of November 2014.
Arrival and installation of Beskow
21 October
15:00 Cray personnel arrive onsite at PDC - checking computer hall is ready for Beskow to arrive the next day
22 October - Work begins on delivering the parts for Beskow
07:56 Delivery trucks arrive
First crate is unloaded
First crate is taken into the PDC delivery area
Opening the first crate
La voila! First cabinet unwrapped
Uh oh.. did anyone check if it fits through the door?
Taking first cabinet from delivery area into the computer hall
First cabinet ready to be moved into its final position
First cabinet in place in the PDC computer hall
Blower cabinet being moved into place
Beskow has pairs of compute cabinets with blower cabinets in between. There are so many that there need to be two rows.
Second row starts to take shape...
...under the windows
Another cabinet on the way in
The joy of stairs
Blower cabinet being installed
Moving another cabinet into place
They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but look how quickly things progressed... 13: 23 All cabinets for both rows of Beskow are in place in the PDC computer hall
23 October - Getting connected
09:25 Power cables being connected
Gordian knot? No worries!
The large cables are for connecting nodes in two adjacent cabinets and the smaller ones are optical cables connecting cabinets over a longer distance.
14:05 Attaching doors to cabinets
14:14 Front row with all doors on
16:08 Hoses for cooling are connected to the system
16:31 Power is connected to the system
24 October - Power on!
09:15 Power on!
11:40 Running memory test
The cabinet here is a separate cabinet that controls both Beskow and Milner (another Cray system which is dedicated for neuroinformatics research).
The uninterruptable power supply (UPS) display shows that the power is around 700 kW (shared over two UPSs).
