The many dozens of researchers who helped test the machine allowed Chinook's handlers to work out the bugs. Because there are so few clusters of this size, the testing was a vital part of the process, and the more realistic the testing, the better.
"If you just have a few people running large jobs, the amount of communication back and forth between the nodes is very different than if you have a hundred people running calculations of various sizes and in various places on the machine," said PNNL's Erich Vorpagel, who manages all research projects on Chinook at EMSL.
Chinook has 4620 Quad-core processors built into 2310 nodes. Each node can be thought of as the equivalent of four personal computers. But Chinook's nodes are more like supercharged PCs: the Quad-cores give each node the equivalent of eight processor-cores and 32 gigabytes of memory.
EMSL News presents the building of its newest supercomputer.
(Photo Credit: EMSL)
Chinook is a high performance computer that has been tailored to meet the current and future operational needs of Department of Energy EMSL users and can perform more than 160 trillion calculations per second.
(Photo Credit: PNNL)