A Closer Look at the Kaleidoscope Supercomputer

Yesterday we wrote about the Kaleidoscope Project, which is being hosted in the Houston data center of managed hosting provider CyrusOne. Kaleidoscope harnesses 120 teraflops of computing power to generate digital images of oil reserves buried thousands of feet below the seabed. At right is a closer look at the Kaleidoscope installation, which is powered by 600 IBM PowerXCell 8i processors in eight cabinets that occupy just 22 square feet of floor space, resulting in a power load of 750 watts a square foot in that area of the CyrusOne data center. Kaleidoscope is a collaboration between Repsol; the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (home to the MareNostrum supercomputer); 3DGeo, a Houston-based imaging company formed by Stanford University professor and seismic imaging pioneer Biondo Biondi; and Stanford University’s Stanford Exploration Project (SEP).