So I’m typing this from the back room in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Nevada. We’re almost done setting up our full-height rack with all our computing nodes. We’re hooking up the 5 Gbps Infiniband as I type. After we’ve got the hardware all set up, we still have a bunch to do on the software side of things.
The other teams are arriving now also. The Taiwanese team is already here, they are just waiting for their rack. The Purdue team has shipping containers strewn about, but their team isn’t here yet. Same with the Indiana University team - their Apple hardware is just sitting there, some eight or 10 XServes, plus a paltry 23-inch Cinema Display. Our Plasma TV is 42 inches, and it’ll be displaying all our progress, as well as the slickest screensavers I can find.
After that, we have a all-hands meeting to go after safety procedures, and tonight, when everything is ready, all the teams are going on a chilly late-evening dinner cruise on Lake Tahoe. It sounds pretty fun, I’ll tell you about in my next post.
