So, the cluster is here.

The good news: I think we’ll be able to use it (albeit without Infiniband for now) by the end of the day.

The bad news: FedEx clearly dropped one entire rack. Yes. Unbelievable. About $110,000 worth of equipment. When it got here, there were plastic parts coming out from under the door of the crate. From the looks of it, it faceplanted off of a loading dock or a forklift. The tilt sensor was definitely tripped. Some of it may still be good, but it all has to be thoroughly inspected. Penguin is just building us a whole new rack. We lucked out in a way — it was the only rack with no ‘special’ components. All of the other racks have something special. One has the head node (not a big deal). One has the Infiniband switch (very expensive with long lead time to replace), and one has a fileserver with a Xyratex storage unit (also very expensive with long lead time). This rack just had compute nodes and a regular gigabit switch.

I’ll have more news and pictures once we get further along.