coolers arrived

The cooling units for the new machine arrived. They are freaking HUGE. 4 of them, easily 800 sq ft of cooling equipment alone. Ouch:

Like I said, there were 4 of these trucks. It's really amazing to think about the large number of people and companies involved in making this project happen.
The crane you see there was for moving the coolers from the trucks into the buildings that were made to house them. Looks like the schedule is moving along as planned.

I was very skeptical about this project at first, but it may end up actually working! 2/6 of the main components of this cluster actually appear to be up to snuff enough to not be impediments. Here are the 6 components:

1. HCA's (these are the infiniband internal cards for each node) - apparently ready
2. Software needed to schedule jobs - not yet ready, perhaps the beta will work in time
3. Processors - seemingly ready - people are already testing them in the wild
4. Main infiniband switch. The prototype (first of its kind in the world) has been reported as working
5. Racks - I've seen one picture of the prototype, so I know it exists
6. Actual nodes themselves - I've heard they managed to get one to install and boot - w00t!

So there you have it. No equipment has arrived yet, since there is not yet a finalized contract for this thing yet. When you have 3 large entities trying to work out a multi-million dollar contract, deadlines are almost never met. I hear rumors that we are probably 1-2 weeks from actually getting it finished. Once it's finished, the equipment will actually begin to arrive, and we can start on figuring out how to get everything to run the way it should!