Fall Colors
The view from the Peak to Peak highway. You can click on the image to find the full-sized version, and I highly recommend you do!
Fall has hit the Front Range, and the Aspen trees are showing it. I took these photos on my bike ride today, and I could have taken dozens more, but I would have never made it back home! I wasn't the only one out there admiring the fall foliage - traffic was about as busy as I've ever seen it, and I saw many people pulled off to the sides of the roads taking pictures of the trees and views.
Since most of you cannot be like all the people I saw today and admire the views in person, here are some of the more spectacular views I felt were worth stopping for and sharing.
Riverside Drive past Raymond. This is one of my favorite roads in this area. It takes 2 hours to get to, and it's over 7500 feet in elevation, but it looks like this the whole way.
A panorama of Riverside Drive between Riverside and Raymond. Happily, even today the road had almost no traffic. Again, you should look at the full-sized version!
more ...CU Janus Supercomputer
Last night I had the opportunity to tour the supercomputer recently built here at CU named "Janus" that I've been using. It is a 16,000-core Dell cluster using 6-core Intel processors running RedHat Linux. It was built in an interesting way. Instead of building a machine room in a building and then filling it with cooling ducts, pipes, and power connections, the machine room is made up of standard shipping containers that had all those connections in place, similar to a pre-fab house. These were shipped from the factory (in Canada, I think) on trucks, and then dropped next to each other in a parking lot behind a campus building. Unfortunately, because it was nighttime, I don't have a good picture of the outside.
Below are some pictures I took of Janus.
The machine racks. The door encloses the ‘hot' side of the machines, where the air is sucked to the heat exchangers.
The cooling system.
The blinky and hot end of the machines. Lots of wires!
A close up of the back of a compute node. Notice that they have serial ports, which are based on a 40+ year old standard. At least they have USB ports, too.
It was using 415 kW of power. I think it can go much higher than that when the machine is under heavy load on a hot day.
more ...