The Most Beautiful Supercomputer in the World
MareNostrum, is the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which is installed in a former chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). It was presented by IBM and María Jesús San Segundo, the Spanish Minister of Education and Science. The supercomputer consists of 2560 JS21 blade computing nodes, each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP processors running at 2.3 GHz for 10240 CPUs in total.
MareNostrum's Myrinet interconnect fabric requires four cabinets. Myricom did a nice job of reducing the cable count as much as they could by using quad-link ribbon cables between their switch elements. But with 12 separate switch elements in the fabric that means they still have a lot of cables and more cables means more connectors, more points of potential failure. They also use one cable per compute node, as is typically done in cluster configurations. Lots more cables, lots more connectors.
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