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This is the Big Iron page. Actually, the rack of computers page. I took a bunch of photos of the various computer setups around the show floor. Here are the highlights.

1U rack of something or other. Unfortunately I can't read the label on the front panels, so I can't give credit to the company who put this rack together. But it looks cool anyway. They have KDE running on their console.

After getting /.'ed, I've gotten a bunch of e-mails about what is in the rack in the picture above. I've been told that they are alpha CPU's and the system belongs to API Networks. I'll let you do a google search to find their website if you wish to surf over there.

SGI setup 8 Itanium PC's running Linux. I tried to get the SGI rep to let me run some of my code on this cluster but he wouldn't let me. From what he told me, you may be able to get several Gigaflops/node. You'll have to wait until March of next year before you can buy one of these clusters.

A close up of the Itanium boxes.

This is SGI's 3000 series computer system. Its 128 nodes of computing power. They had some cool visualization applications running on this system.

A close up of one of the 4 racks of 1 GHz CPU's which will be delivered to the University of Delaware. And that stuffed doll you see in the picture, it's not a penguin (as I first thought), it's a chicken! YoUDee, the U of Delaware mascot. OK, so it's a chicken, do you have a problem with that?

Linux Networx decided to put their boxen horizontally in order to help with the cooling.

IBM is show off their power4 architecture. They are developing either a dual or quad PPC system on a single chip. The IBM'er here is hold up a model of the CPU chip. He told me that a group of engineers worked on the system for a week to get Linux up and running, although the system behind him wasn't running Linux at the moment.

The above is a mock up of the layout of the computer system at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Imagine having to roll out a distribution upgrade on all those machines....

The HP booth had the Itanium CPU on display. It's about the same size as a Xeon PIII.

Over at the Compaq booth, I found these three racks of Alpha PC's running Linux. I tried to get the Compaq people to let me run my code on this system, but they wouldn't let me.

The PPC/Macintosh booth. The founder of yellow dog is standing on the left with his associate to the right. His associate has his hand on a rack full of G4 systems hooked up through myranet. They had a parallelized version of povray running.

Here we have the PPC on some MPC cards. They are PCI connected to the VME base card. 4 PPC per VME card, many VME cards in a VME rack. This guy did let me run my code on their system. The performance was close to what I get on my 450Mhz PIII. Try putting a quad PIII system on a single slot VME card! The system is tied together with myranet.

A close up of the PPC on VME boards.

This picture is of IBM's rack of Linux PCs. What's unique about this setup is that they are demoing their global file system. They have a .5 Terabyte file system laced between the racks, served up via fiber channel through GPFS to their many nodes of CPU's.

I asked the IBM person who was in charge of this demo to do a df for me so that I could verify that they really did have .5 Terabytes of disk. It looks like they do.

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