Big Iron Secrets

Think your computer is a beast? Think again, as Jake Carroll takes us on a journey into the mysteries of serious corporate computing power.

As an Atomican, you generally push your rig hard. You clock it up, you tighten the timings and you cool the bejebus out of it. You stand back and watch your buddies drool at the quad GPU meltdown.

The data centres of the world are playing a very different game however. ‘Big Iron’ is a term of respect for extremely large, powerful computing infrastructure.

Leave your desktop at the door.

The technology found in a typical high performance computing (HPC) environment is alien to desktop computing. We’ll break it down into a few sections for easy digestion:

* CPU engineering
* Networking
* Storage
* Graphics/GPU/SPU
* Hardware management techniques
* Software (OS/architecture)
* Filesystems

Read on to find out all about the ultimate in big boys’ toys!