zBox4 Construction

The zBox4 is the latest upgrade to the famous zBox supercomputer. Located in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, the zBox features a custom rack design that houses 3,072 2.2GHz Intel Xeon cores and over 12TB of RAM. Each node is connected to a high speed Infiniband network, that enables researchers to perform cutting edge parallel N-body simulations of galaxy, star, and planet formation. The GHalo simulation featured in this video has over 3 billion particles and models the formation of a dark matter halo similar to that containing our own Milky Way galaxy.

Find the full details at http://www.zBox4.com

A full length video of the simulation can be found here http://youtu.be/Ty7jN-hzb-E

Music: "2Day is the Day" by Milk67 & Professor Moore, www.milk67.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[itpuzh]

So take a far worse CPU, buy more than we have space for, use harddrives we don't need (main storage of 684TB is in another rack), use GPUs that our code can't benefit from, and far overrun our power budget? Sounds like a good idea.

[itpuzh]

Infinite. It runs Linux.

[zaprodk]

Nothing on a standard motherboard will be hotter than 100 Degrees C, so no normal plastic parts will melt.

[Ernie Dunbar]

Almost, but not quite. More like 192 server-class "PC's", each with 2 $1400 CPUs. The motherboards are no less expensive. Neither is the RAM. But the OCZ flash drives you can get off the shelf at your local computer shop for less than $150. I actually own one of those.

[Ernie Dunbar]

You blame your ping times on your computer hardware, don't you?

[Bimbo Jack]

the real question is, how fast can I download porn on it?

[Otakumasim]

Have you considered the cost/benefit of switching your code base to the GPU (Cuda or OpenCL) and focus on using as many GPUs instead of as many CPU as possible?

Impressive job!

[geronimodk]

So basically it's just 192 "regular" PCs (with two 8x core CPUs) crammed in a rack together doing distributed computing via a LAN?

[Daniel Gonzalez]

para jugar al TETRIS!

[TheHaadah]

Impressive assembly time.

Could you elaborate on the power supply? It looks like you are using one power supply per two nodes? Did you design the distributor yourselves, or is it a commercial one?