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Battle of the boxes
Last October, the front of the SLAC computing center looked like an elaborate children's war game in progress. Ad hoc piles of polystyrene, plastic, wooden pallets, and cardboard created an image of bunkers and trenches in a plastic post-industrial landscape. Within a few days, the scene was gone but it will reappear in the near future.
The piles of packaging grew as workers unpacked a new shipment of 353 Sun computers. Like many labs, SLAC buys hundreds of individual PCs instead of a few large units to get the most computing power for its dollar.
"Cabinet units can cost ten times more than their PC counterparts," says Charles Boeheim, assistant director of Scientific Computing and Computing Services at SLAC. "Because each collision in a particle accelerator is an independent event, it's possible to farm out analysis to individual PCs and save on computing costs."
SLAC currently runs about 3000 processors in its computing center and receives large shipments of new computers every six to twelve months. It takes six people just to arrange the logistics of unpacking each box, rolling the computers into the building, setting up the racks that will house them, hooking them up to power, loading necessary software, and connecting them to the network. On average, this process takes a little over a month, but the first few days create the detritus of unpacking that is gradually cleaned up and recycled where possible.
"People will stand around and gawk at the unloading process," Boeheim says. "Then they expect the computers to be up and running the next day. They don't realize all that goes on inside the computing building for weeks afterwards. But if people don't know we're here, we're doing our jobs right."
Kelen Tuttle
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