The Peloton Super Computer purchase is a program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory intended to provide tera-FLOP computing capability using commodity Scalable Units (SUs). The Peloton RFP defines the system configurations. Appro was awarded the contract for Peloton which includes the following machines:
All of the machines run the CHAOS variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Moab resource management system. Under the project management of John Lee, the team at Synnex, Voltaire, Supermicro and other suppliers, the scientists were able to dramatically reduce the amount of time it took to go from starting the cluster build to actually having hardware here at Livermore in production. In particular, it went from having 4 SUs on the floor on a Thursday, to bring 2 more SUs in for that final cluster and by Saturday, had all of them wired up, burned in, and running Linpack.