Queueing Aspects of Integrated Information and Computing Systems in Geosciences and Natural Sciences - Advances in Data, Methods, Models and Their Applications in Geoscience - page 6

Fig. 2. Water-cooling in rack.
5.3 System core resources
For the main purpose of computing, large numbers of compute nodes are needed. The main
system resources are cores and memory. The first two images in Figure 3 show a rack with
compute nodes (SGI, 2011) and some thousand memory sticks needed for one supercomputer
installation.
Fig. 3. Core resources and storage: compute nodes, memory, and disk storage unit.
5.4 System networks
With the increase of core resources, the more networks infrastructure is needed to operate
these resources and make them accessible as a system. Figure 4 shows cabling and switches.
Currently the significance of networks is rapidly increasing. Fibre optics are used to efficiently
and effectively implementing networks. No wonder that in the year 2009 the physics Nobel
Prize was dedicated to fibre optics, for the ground breaking achievements concerning the
transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.
5.5 System storage
Besides cores, memory, and networks large storage capabilities are necessary for permanent
storage. Figure 3 shows a disk storage unit consisting of several racks of hard disk drives,
controllers, and servers.