Between now and the end of the year, the Leibniz supercomputer will be upgraded incrementally to dual-socket Itanium 2 servers. Additionally, some of the blades will move to the 1.6GHz 9MB cache Montecito dual-core Itanium 2.
This is part of Professor Hegering's strategy of improving the supercomputer without widespread disruption. The whole computer room is built in such a way as to be easily upgradeable. But it does not rely on Intel's ability to offer upgraded processors. At the end of the upgrade, peak performance of around 60 trillion flops will put the Leibniz supercomputer near the top of the Top 500 supercomputer list.
However, Professor Hegering does not put much faith in the Top 500 list, which he calls an "artificial measurement".
"It is comparable to categorising all vehicles with one number," Hegering says, “How do you distinguish between a bus and a truck? It says nothing about search, about frequency bandwidth, about many other factors."
The Top 500 is not for academics, Hegering argues. "Of course your position in the Top 500 is important, but mainly for political reasons," he says. "Politicians like to see they have something that is up there."
Like the true IT professional he is — and he has been working on supercomputers since 1968 — Hegering says: "My aim was to optimise the usability of the system."
As Hegering showed us, underneath these systems is a massive two-metre void filled with hundreds of pillars sitting a very short distance apart. Any of the pillars, which are supporting these systems, can be removed to allow any of the mass of cabling to be moved or removed and replaced with ease. If the LRZ moves to a completely different computer platform with completely different infrastructure platform, the old one can be removed and the new one put in with ease.
