We rolled out a new product at my work on Tuesday, Earth Day 2008, it was purely coincidence. What you you're looking at is a portable cluster that is made in the Twin Cities. What is a cluster? Essentially it is a super computer that is used for doing massive calculations in a short time frame. For example, we sent a cluster to another customer of ours last week. The program that they run, on their old system took a day and a half to run through all the calculations. We received feedback on their new cluster that we built for them shorted that time frame down to 30 minutes! Myself and a fellow co-worker did a good portion of the assembly and software setup. The engineering team did the research and development, while my server builders built the nodes. This was a time consuming project with huge results and it's something I wanted to share with you all today.
What's unique about our portable clusters, aside from it being portable, is it runs on only one 120 Volt, 20 AMP circuit. This is the same power plug that your home computer is plugged into the wall outlet. This is a huge deal when you need a product like this , you bring it to a new work site and all you have is standard power. Typically a cluster needs a lot of power to run. I've seen 30 AMP plugs, 230 Volt plus, or separate power for each node. The power savings we have engineered into this product to keep it running on one standard outlet is how this post all ties into Earth Day 2008 in the Twin Cities
4 comments:
What does a cluster do? I see a place to play a cd. Where is the amp and sound mixer? OK, I guess its not a stereo part.
Very, very, very cool! Congratulations. No small feat to accomplish all this in a portable unit! You should be (justifiably) proud of your team accomplishments!
Small world? I used to frequent your blog last year before we moved to MN to get my hometown fix. We exchanged a few comments since we grew up around the same area (loved that post of R.C. Dick's!). Well we moved up last April and my husband worked briefly for his friend Jeff Olsen @ NT. From the looks of these clusters, I would say ya'll were co-workers! Crazy!
Love it !
Go Cluster, surely not Clusters' Last Stand {:-)
Cheers from the Land Down Under...
www.OzeNetworks.com
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