There were no Macs, save for one machine that was being used by the Web team to update the site: the organizers of the event had asked for only X86-family machines, to keep the number of variables down while they assembled their gigantic supercomputer.
By 10:30 we had roughly 650 PCs on the floor of the gym. They were placed on folding tables that had pre-cut cables organized and laid down their lengths. The cables all terminated at a bunch of Foundry Big Iron super-switches that were located around the room (Foundry had loaned close to $500,000 worth of gear, which is a significant proportion of the value of the computers on the floor.)
The experiment was supposed to begin around 11, but various problems kept the organizers from running the Linpack benchmark for several hours. Still, the level of organization was impressive: Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and the numerous reporters had plenty of time to interview the principals as well as talk to various industry luminaries who follow these supercomputer events like groupies of a major rock band. One was Gordon Bell, who was the father of the VAX while he worked at DEC and is now a Microsoft fellow. He was carrying his own laptop, but forgot to bring his CD drive so he wasn't able to connect to the mob.
What made the day for me wasn't just seeing all this gear hooked up but the ancillary people and meetings that were happening elsewhere on the USF campus. To augment the day's activities, we were treated to a series of talks by leading experts, including computer scientists at national laboratories, NASA, HP and Microsoft. While it was a Saturday, I still found myself spending more time at the seminars than I anticipated, just because they were so interesting. It isn't often that you can sit and learn from the leading thinkers of computer science, and hear about how NASA is doing global climate models, or how Microsoft built its Terraserver, the database of maps of the United States. I really liked Jim Gray's talk. He is a research fellow at Microsoft and one of the original designers behind the TPC benchmark while he was at Tandem.
"There are two types of supercomputing problems now: finding a needle in a haystack, and finding all the haystacks," he said. "Computers are good at one or the other, but not both." As an example, he mentioned skyserver.sdss.org, a site that consolidates and analyzes the leading astronomical observatories around the world, all using Web Services, XML, and some common coding. "Astronomy isn't anymore about guys sitting up through the night looking through telescopes at the tops of mountains," he said. "Instead, it is all about reducing large amounts of data down to a form that humans can actually analyze it." He mentions that Microsoft receives as part of its Terraserver project a box of firewire hard disks from the government, with the terrabytes of data that are needed to update the site.
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