MACH⁵ an Apple Supercluster for Hypersonic CFD

We describe the acquisition and installation process for a 1566-node supercluster of dual 2.0 GHz G5 Apple Xserves dedicated to the modeling of hypersonic flight of missiles and scramjet engines. The installed system is known as MACH⁵, an acronym for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonics using G5s. The CFD application and its prodigious computational requirements as well as the process we have gone through to select a system to match those requirements will be described. The final system was selected through a bid process from a number of major computer vendors and awarded to Apple Corporation in May of 2004. We discuss the installation procedure for the system at our Huntsville, AL location including connecting the system and all its parts, the infrastructure installation, and the process to bring the system online to an operational state. We will elaborate on a number of lessons-learned from ‘rolling your own’ supercluster for a production system.