CSCS Technology

Decommission of IBM P5 «Blanc» at CSCS

On January 8th, 2010 the compute nodes of «Blanc» an IBM P5 have been switched off and on January 31st, 2010 the login nodes have also be switched off .

CSCS Blanc - IBM P5
CSCS Blanc – IBM P5

This computer has been named after Mont Blanc in the French-Italian Alps, elevation 4807 m and his last configuration has been the follow:

  • 48 nodes with 16 IBM Power 5
  • 1780 GB DDR II Ram
  • 40 TB Disk
  • 10 GBit IB interconnect

Blanc started its life as production system on January 24th, 2007. This computer was another first of its kind. It was the first supercomputer based on Power 5 processors that runs Linux operating system using Infiniband as high-speed interconnect. This computer was another first of its kind. It was the first supercomputer based on Power 5 processors which run a Linux Operating System using InfiniBand high-speed interconnect.

Blanc was mainly used for high-memory jobs and for problems with limited scalability due to the size of the studied systems and the properties of interest.

The next photo depicts the interconnect of Blanc being based on InfiniBand.

Blanc_IB

Compute nodes of Blanc.

Blanc_Node

Compute blade.