How to Treat Your Computer: MareNostrum
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 08.28.07
The new TreeHugger Server Farm The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre is housed in the Torre Girona chapel. It may only be the ninth biggest supercomputer in the world, but it is certainly the most beautiful. What a great example of how buildings can adapt to anything, how good design transforms the banal into the beautiful, and what a wonderful place to pray for those who worship technology.
SC-CNS hosts MareNostrum, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the number 9 in the world, according to the last Top500 list. In March 2004 the Spanish government and IBM signed an agreement to build one of the the fastest computer in Europe. In November 2006 its capacity has been increased due to the large demand of scientific projects. MareNostrum has increased the calculation capacity of the supercomputer MareNostrum, until reaching 94.21 Teraflops (94.21 trillions of operations per second), doubling its previous capacity (42.35 Teraflops). It had 4.812 processors and has now 10.240 processors with a final calculation capacity of 94.21 Teraflops.
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Wow. That's absolutely gorgeous.
I'd love to see higher-rez photos - how can they have a setup that gorgeous, and not have ANY pictures on their website?
I notice there aren't any statistics on power usage, effect on the environment, efficiency, or anything that might even be pertinent to TreeHugger...
How is this relevant to TreeHugger?? Because it's pretty and minimalist? Much can be said about it, but I don't think it merits one of the MANY MANY articles that TreeHugger posts every day....
Considering that my feed reader gets burdened by TreeHugger posts every day (within two days i easily have 100+ entries for TreeHugger alone), I wonder if this is even relevant, especially considering that they aren't lacking in amount of content...
LA: it is on there because of building re-use, not computer power. And it is pretty.
Whilst it is a good question whether any data centre should be considered 'green', this is actualy an excellent example of energy efficiency in a data centre. The Mare Nostrum cluster is made up of more than 2500 blades in a room of around 160 square metres floor area. The DC floor supports cooling of around 4kW/sqm through 'close coupling' and this enables a huge reduction in the energy normally required to cool the heat generated by this number of blades. In short, this installation consumes a lot of power but requires far less power than traditional installations to cool the same IT load.