From networking equipment to supercomputing hardware, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has been at the forefront of high-performance computing for decades. At the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest in Schaumburg, Illinois, on September 12–13, visitors got a firsthand look at that history.
Argonne joined more than 6,000 attendees at this year’s event, one of the largest vintage computing gatherings in the world. Argonne staff showcased two tables filled with hardware and software that helped build some of the world’s most powerful computers.
Visitors saw rare and classic equipment used in past research at the lab, including components from an IBM Blue Gene system, a functional 8-year-old Cray node, and an example of the first production 100G Ethernet product brought to market.
“It was exciting to have a solid 20 years of compute and network hardware evolution spread out across our display,” said Carissa Holohan, a principal HPC network architect at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Holohan spent hours tracking down archived photos, locating equipment stored around the lab, identifying hardware and getting some of it working for demonstrations.
“The support from everyone at Argonne was wonderful, from planning the exhibit and getting the logistics sorted out, to volunteering at our booth,” said Wilkie Olin-Ammentorp, an assistant computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science division who managed Argonne’s participation in the festival.
The booth generated enthusiastic response from the attendees.
“People were excited to engage hands-on with real-world supercomputing hardware that had been used for pushing the boundaries of science,” Olin-Ammentorp said. “Many of the visitors were fascinated by the advances that have been made over the decades and the role Argonne has played — and continues to play — as a leader in high-performance scientific computing,”
The event also gave Argonne personnel an opportunity to connect with researchers and operations staff from universities, answer questions about careers and share information about the lab’s educational programs.
“Sharing Argonne’s rich computing legacy can help people see how today’s technology has evolved from the hardware and software of the past,” Olin-Ammentorp said. “It also offers a glimpse into the important role high-performance computing plays in advancing Argonne’s open science research.”
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.