Bassi — IBM POWER 5

Born on October 31, 1711 in Bologna, Bassi was the daughter of a lawyer. Educated privately, Bassi studied logic, metaphysics, philosophy, chemistry, hydraulics, mathematics, mechanics, algebra, geometry, and ancient and modern languages (Greek, Latin, French, and Italian).

Bassi was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bologna in 1731, was elected to the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in 1732, and was given the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Bologna in 1733. In 1738, she married her colleague Dr. Giuseppe Veratti. They had 12 children.

While raising her family, she successfully petitioned for wider responsibilities and a higher salary to cover the cost of equipment for physical and electrical experiments. She continued her lifelong interest in physics, lecturing from her home while her children were small then returning to the university at age 65 as a Professor of Experimental Physics in 1776. Living to the ripe old age of 66, she died on February 20, 1778.

More info: Laura Bassi

About Bassi

The NERSC IBM p575 POWER 5 system, named Bassi, is a distributed memory computer with 888 processors available to run scientific computing applications. The machine is named in honor of Laura Bassi, a noted Newtonian physicist of the eighteenth century.

Each Bassi processor has a theoretical peak performance of 7.6 GFlops. The processors are distributed among 111 compute nodes with 8 processors per node. Processors on each node have a shared memory pool of 32 GBytes. A Bassi node is an example of a Shared Memory Processor or SMP.

The compute nodes are connected to each other with a high-bandwidth, low-latency switching network. Each node runs its own full instance of the standard AIX operating system. The disk storage system is a distributed, parallel I/O system called GPFS. Additional nodes serve exclusively as GPFS servers.

Bassi's network switch is the IBM "Federation" HPS switch which is connected to a two-link network adapter on each node.

Bassi Configuration

• 122 8-processor nodes (with 32GB memory each)
• 1.9 GHz POWER 5 processors
• 111 compute nodes (888 processors)
• 3.5 TB aggregate memory on compute nodes
• 7.6 GFlops/sec peak processor speed
• 6.7 TFlops theoretical peak system performance
• 100 TB of usable disk space in GPFS
• 2 login nodes
• 6 nodes supporting the General Parallel Filesystem (GPFS)
• Nodes configured to use 20 GB "Large Page" memory

Bassi specifications