Deployment and testing of the sustained petascale Blue Waters system

摘要

Deployment of a large parallel system typically involves several steps of preparation, delivery, installation, testing and acceptance, making such deployments a very complex process. Despite the availability of various petascale systems currently, the steps and lessons from their deployment are rarely described in the literature. This article documents our experiences from the deployment of the sustained petascale Blue Waters system at NCSA. Our presentation is focused on the final deployment steps, where the system was intensively tested and accepted by NCSA. Those experiences and lessons should be useful to guide similarly complex deployments of large systems in the future. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.