ディーゼル式自家発電機駆動のコンテナ・スパコンセンター(2009年)

2009年に話題になった、ディーゼル式自家発電機駆動のコンテナ・スパコンセンター。
ハーバード大学の宇宙物理のグループが砂漠に計測機器のそばにGPUを利用した20Tflops（初代地球シミュレータの半分くらいの性能）のデータの前処理用の計算機作りました。

http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/GPU2009/1002-california-1065.html
http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC/videos/GTC09-1065.flv

Diesel-Powered GPU Computing: Enabling a Real-Time Radio Telescope in the Australian Outback

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope currently under construction in the remote Western Australia Outback. The raw data rate is 5 to 20 GiB/sec, precluding offline processing. Since the computing budget for calibration and imaging is 20 TFLOP/sec, a real-time high-performance computer is required on-site. We describe a scalable heterogeneous computing pipeline implementation, exploiting both the high computing density and FLOP-per-watt ratio of modern GPUs. The architecture is highly parallel within and across nodes, with all major processing elements performed by the GPUs. Necessary scatter-gather operations along the pipeline are loosely synchronized and implemented in MPI. Our initial port to NVIDIA hardware shows a typical 10x improvement over the reference CPU implementation, with some portions showing even more substantial gains. The MWA will be a frontier scientific instrument and a demonstrator for planned peta- and exascale facilities.