The Space Simulator: Modeling the Universe from Supernovae to Cosmology

The Space Simulator is a 294-processor Beowulf cluster with theoretical peak performance just below 1.5 Teraflop/s. It is based on the Shuttle XPC SS51G mini chassis. Each node consists of a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1 Gb of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, an 80 Gbyte Maxtor hard drive, and a 3Com 3C996B-T gigabit ethernet card. The network is made up of a Foundry FastIron 1500 and 800 Gigabit Ethernet switch. Each individual node cost less than $1000, and the entire system cost under $500,000. The cluster achieved Linpack performance of 665.1 Gflop/s on 288 processors in October 2002, making it the 85th fastest computer in the world according to the 20th TOP500 list. Performance has since improved to 757.1 Linpack Gflop/s, ranking at #88 on the 21st TOP500 list. This is the first machine in the TOP500 to surpass Linpack price/performance of 1 dollar per Mflop/s.