*Even if it's just a "testbed" of some kind, that's pretty messed-up.
And it's in Los Alamos, no less
System with thousands of nodes brings affordable testbed to supercomputing system-software developers
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Nov. 13, 2017—A quest to help the systems software community work on very large supercomputers without having to actually test on them has spawned an affordable, scalable system using thousands of inexpensive Raspberry Pi nodes. It brings a powerful high-performance-computing testbed to system-software developers, researchers, and others who lack machine time on the world’s fastest supercomputers.
“It’s not like you can keep a petascale machine around for R&D work in scalable systems software,” said Gary Grider, leader of the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the Trinity supercomputer. “The Raspberry Pi modules let developers figure out how to write this software and get it to work reliably without having a dedicated testbed of the same size, which would cost a quarter billion dollars and use 25 megawatts of electricity.”
Grider conceived the new solution to provide the systems software community with an inexpensive testbed of similar scale to the largest supercomputers being deployed. Designed and built by BitScope and distributed by SICORP, the Pi Cluster Modules enable developers to build, scale and test software before launching it on Trinity, Crossroads, and other large systems. The modules have other potential applications from education to the internet of things....
