The Bigben supercomputer was a Cray XT3 MPP system with 2068 nodes located at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. It was decommissioned on March 31, 2010. Bigben was a part of the

TeraGrid TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

System architecture

BigBen was a

Cray XT3 The Cray XT3, also known by codename '' Red Storm'', is a distributed memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer designed by Cray Inc.. Cray collaborated with and delivered to Sandia National Laboratories in 2004. The XT3 derives much of its ...

MPP system with 2,068 compute nodes linked by a custom-designed interconnect. Twenty-two dedicated IO processors were also connected to this network. Each compute node had two 2.6 GHz AMD

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation Microprocessor, processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sl ...

processors. Each compute processor had its own cache, but the two processors on a node shared 2 GB of

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

and the network connection.

Operating system

Bigben ran Catamount, a subset of

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

.{{Cite journal , last=Nystrom , first=Nick , last2=Weisser , first2=Deborah , last3=Lim , first3=Junwoo , last4=Wang , first4=Yang , last5=Brown , first5=Shawn T. , last6=Reddy , first6=Raghu , last7=Stone , first7=Nathan T. , last8=Woodward , first8=Paul , last9=Porter , first9=David , last10=Di Matteo , first10=Tiziana , last11=Kalé , first11=L. V. , last12=Zheng , first12=Gengbin , year=2006 , title=Enabling Computational Science on the Cray XT3 , url=https://cug.org/5-publications/proceedings_attendee_lists/2006CD/S06_Proceedings/pages/Authors/Nystrom/Nystrom_Paper.pdf , journal=CUG Conference 2006 , location=Zurich , publisher= Cray User Group , access-date=February 16, 2025 On Bigben's front-end processors,

SUSE Linux openSUSE () is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable release distribution which is so ...

was used.

File system

Bigben had two file systems comprising together over 200 TB of storage space.

Compilers

Bigben had Portland Group,

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

, and UPC compilers installed.

References

External links