Here\'s a small "icebreaker" presentation that I used to set the stage for SiCortex technical briefings. TACC folks, this is a joke - all in good fun!!!

1. WARNING The story you are about to see is TRUE. Ugly… but TRUE. The names have been omitted to protect the terminally myopic. Fine Print – This work is entirely satirical fiction and any incidental usage of copyrighted materials is claimed under the parody statutes of fair use law.

3. Let’s Build a SUPERCOMPUTER!

4. We want our applications to run FAST! Say, what is the fastest chip on the planet this month? How about a little Google search here…

5. GREAT SUCCESS… AGAIN! All the “experts” agree… It’s the new AMDtel “Baghdad-town” running at 99.9 ZetaHz! Let’s spec it in our RFP!

6. ATTENTION VENDORS. Here’s our RFP for a 6,000 CPU cluster! “MUST BE AMDtel “Baghdad-town” 99.9 ZetaHz!” Hey - IBM, DELL, HP, SUN, SGI, white boxes… Who wants to be cheapest?

7. Only 28 proposals left to read… Hmmm, they all say “Some Assembly Required”. I wonder what that means ?

8. BINGO - WE HAVE A WINNER! Invoice TOTAL * with shipping… $1,999,999.98 * ? *INSTALLATION NOT INCLUDED, SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED Gee - how do those slick vendors know how much money we have? It’s like they can read our minds!

9. I guess we’ll just have to spend a few of our own dollars for site preparation and installation… How bad can it be? Let’s GO!

10. We’re in luck! We already have an empty Computer Room from when they decommissioned that old mainframe! This should save us a fortune!

11. Now let’s add some power distribution… Say again, how many MEGAWATTS do we need ???

12. I just did some rough calculations… This cluster’s going to generate as much heat as a small thermonuclear device. Think we have enough chillers????

13. OOPS. Guess we also might need some new PLUMBING to feed those new cold water chillers…

14. Oh yea, we might need that extra heat exchanger after all…

15. Looks Great! Cold as an Arctic meat locker. Ok, we’re ready to add the computers! Hey - where did all of our floor space go???

16. “ This your Warehouse speaking. Come and get your delivery. We have no room to store it here.”

17. Yay! The computers have arrived! START UNBOXING! Only 196 more pallets left to go!

18. Good thing we’ve got an almost unlimited supply of smart slave labor - grad students!

19. Tick… Tick… Tick…

20. EMERGENCY! We need more LC to LC connectors – NOW! Are they in box #239 or #329 ??? Just go find them – quick!

21. Whew…6 racks done! Only 96 more to go!

22. I think we’re gonna need a LOT more dumpsters…

23. AT LAST! Everything’s in the racks! Time to cable it. Wow - eBay definitely has the best deal on cheap cable!

24. What do you mean we have another shorting cable?!!! Gee, maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea. Do you think we should start over using color keyed cables?

25. Grumble, (censored), cuss, Mumble…

26. OH YEA BABY! This is much better! Now where does that %#$@! pink cable go???

27. We’ve done it! It’s finally assembled! STEP BACK! Ready to throw the master power switch… It’s A L I V E!

28. SWEET! Check out all those blinking lights! This is too cool!!!

29. But who knew all those fans would be so loud?

30. Oh well, these signs will only cost us $19.95.

31. But what’s that other funny high speed whining noise?

32. HOLY SMOKE! I didn’t know these things could spin so fast! Hmmm, I wonder how much all this power is costing us?

33. Gee, it’s powered up all right… But the Admin console is as dead as a doornail. LIVE RIGHT NOW!!!

34. Oh, yea. There is no software on the system. Guess we’ll just have to start loading the OS, libs, apps etc onto all those nodes. Anybody seen that big box of installation CDs???

35. Wait a cotton pick’n minute! Some of these nodes have DIFFERENT BIOS VERSIONS. That means different OS builds! And that slick salesman promised us this couldn’t happen. Version 1.3 Version 1.4

36. And what the @#^$?!! Some of these controllers have different revs of microcode! That means different drivers! V4.6.2 V5.0

37. So much for the idea of automatically pushing an identical system image onto every node. Guess we’ll just have to set ‘em up one by one…

38. Tick…Tick…Tick!

39. Days turn to weeks, weeks turn to months, then at long last… YAY!!!! It’s finally running! Let’s run a bunch of our apps on all 6,000 CPUs!

40. POW! FIZZLE! SNAP! S P U T T E R… How come so many of our applications won’t scale beyond 128 CPUs? Bummer.

41. OOPS. The memory is MUCH slower than the CPUs. And the inter-processor communications is far, far slower still. These clusters are unbalanced. Big time.

42. Oh well, good enough. Woweewowwow GREAT SUCCESS! “ Very Nice!”

43. WE’RE #1! We have the fastest CPUs * on the planet! (*from when we started 12 months ago…) We’re ready * to do some cutting edge Science! (* Sorry about that 10 month delay in your research – just work harder – you’ll catch up!) And we sure saved a bundle * on that hardware! (*which is turning out to be a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of this turkey of a project…)

44. 30 days later…

45. “ Sure glad our department doesn’t have to pay this utility bill.”

46. And by the way, were we supposed to end up with all these extra parts?

47. There really is a better way.