The '''Bigben supercomputer '''was a Cray XT3 MPP system with 2068 nodes located at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.<ref>{{Cite web |date=June 23, 2011 |title=Big Ben |url=https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/mmg_disp.jsp?med_id=66033&from= |access-date=February 16, 2025 |website=US National Science Foundation}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Cite news |last=Hemsoth |first=Nicole |date=July 22, 2005 |title=Pittsburgh Unveils 'Big Ben' |url=https://www.hpcwire.com/2005/07/22/pittsburgh_unveils_big_ben-1/ |access-date=February 16, 2025 |work=HPC Wire}}</ref> It was decommissioned on March 31, 2010.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=BigBen (XT3) |url=https://www.psc.edu/resources/xt3/ |access-date=February 16, 2025 |website=Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center}}</ref> Bigben was a part of the TeraGrid.<ref name=":0" />
== System architecture ==
BigBen was a Cray XT3 MPP system with 2,068 compute nodes linked by a custom-designed interconnect.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> Twenty-two dedicated IO processors were also connected to this network.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite report |url=https://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/PDSI/CMU-PDL-08-109.pdf |title=Characterizing HEC Storage Systems at Rest |last=Dayal |first=Shobhit |date=July 2008 |publisher=Carnegie Mellon University |page=9 |access-date=February 16, 2025}}</ref> Each compute node had two 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron processors.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":2">{{Cite web |date=January 29, 2008 |title=Bigben |url=http://www.psc.edu/machines/cray/xt3/bigben.php |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080325100017/http://www.psc.edu/machines/cray/xt3/bigben.php |archive-date=March 25, 2008 |access-date=February 16, 2025 |website=Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center}}</ref> Each compute processor had its own cache, but the two processors on a node shared 2 GB of memory and the network connection.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":2" />
== Operating system == Bigben ran Catamount, a subset of Unix.<ref name=":2" /><ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Nystrom |first1=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}}</ref> On Bigben's front-end processors, SUSE Linux was used.<ref name=":2" />
== File system ==
Bigben had two file systems comprising together over 200 TB of storage space.<ref name=":2" />
== Compilers ==
Bigben had Portland Group, GNU, and UPC compilers installed.<ref name=":2" />
== See also ==
*TeraGrid *National Science Foundation *Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
== References == <references /> == External links ==
*[http://www.psc.edu Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center] *[https://web.archive.org/web/20070630140544/http://www.teragrid.org/ Teragrid] *[http://www.nsf.gov National Science Foundation]
Category:Cray products Category:X86 supercomputers