Through the personal effort of a few members shackspace recently acquired a new and quite awesome toy: an IBM BladeCenter E fully loaded with six dual PowerPC 970FX (2.2GHz) and eight dual PowerPC 970 (1.6GHz) blades.

To make hacking on algorithms and software meant to run highly parallel even more fun, each blade comes with dual Mellanox InfiniBand 1X (2.5Gb/s) adapters on top of their dual GigE ports to ensure that sweet low latency every hacker is craving for.

If you want to take a closer look at the specs or track the progress of the project, make sure to stop by the BladeCenter page in our wiki. Of course, if you ever wanted to try your parallel algorithm or software across 14 machines with a total of 28 cores, we’ve got the means for that now ;) Just drop by and talk to one of the hackers involved in the project.