Bigben (computer)
| Company type | Supercomputer |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Defunct | March 31, 2010 |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh , United States |
| Products | Cray XT3 supercomputer |
The Bigben supercomputer was a Cray XT3 massively parallel processing (MPP) machine consisting of 2,068 nodes, housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. This system was retired on March 31, 2010, and formed a component of the TeraGrid network.
System architecture
Comprising 2,068 computing nodes linked via a proprietary interconnect, BigBen was supported by 22 specialized input/output processors. Each node contained a pair of 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron CPUs, which shared 2 GB of RAM and a network interface, with each CPU equipped with its own cache memory.
Operating system
The supercomputer ran on Catamount, a streamlined version of Unix, while its front-end processors utilized SUSE Linux as their operating system.
File system
BigBen’s storage infrastructure consisted of two file systems offering a combined capacity exceeding 200 TB.
For software development, the system provided compilers from the Portland Group, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), as well as UPC.