Saturday, October 13, 2007 - The computer that sucked up my life

For the last 18 months my husband has been building a supercomputer. He has not been doing this alone of course, but I think he had a lot more to do with it than I ever gave him credit for...until tonight. We went to an open house at the Leibniz Computing Center (LRZ) in Munich where his super computer lives. Here is a link to the details and pictures can be found here as well... www.sgi.com/pdfs/4007.pdf

Here is a picture of 2 rows of the racks....there are rows after rows after rows that look like this:

I got a private tour THANK GOD since my tour was in English and the other tours were just not. I hardly understood a thing he explained, but I have to say that the whole deal was really shocklingly impressive...and enormous. Row after row of racks full of equipment and miles and miles of cables and well, this is THE computer that serves the University of Munich as well as the scientific community in Germany and the rest of Europe if they want to apply to use the computer. I don't even really grasp how this works exactly, but apparently this is the machine if you have a massive problem that a regular computer can't handle...you somehow use this one. There are something like 4800+ processors. I kind of now think my husband is smarter than he lets on around the house. I hear too much of "where are my glasses" etc....no wonder he can't find anything, he's got the biggest computer in Germany on his mind. I'm glad this project has gotten to a point where he's home for dinner again. There for awhile last year he was working so hard and such horrendous hours that he totally lost his pleasing personality...but thankfully it is back again. I like being married to a nerd that loves the dog.