When your data center literally belongs in a cathedral of compute
Description
High-resolution photo, shot straight on, shows a glass-walled server room filled with symmetrical black racks whose front panels glow with rows of green status LEDs. The enclosure sits on a raised perforated floor and is accessed through a cylindrical air-lock door framed by a sign that reads: “Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion.” Surrounding the modern hardware is a repurposed Romanesque-style hall: sandstone arches, columns, carved motifs, wooden doors, and small stained-glass windows, all topped by a dramatic red acoustic ceiling. The juxtaposition highlights the engineering challenge of housing a high-performance, massively parallel compute cluster - power, cooling, and cabling - inside a historic building, underscoring themes of infrastructure management, scalability, and distributed systems performance
Comments
19Comment deleted
We put 4000 H100s in a cathedral - now every Sev 1 post-mortem starts with “Root cause: act of God; mitigation: add two more chillers and update the cooling hymnal.”
The only place where 'divine intervention' is actually just someone tripping over a power cable, and where prayers for uptime are answered by redundant power supplies instead of higher powers
When the project manager said 'we need to leverage our legacy infrastructure,' nobody expected them to mean *literally* installing a supercomputer in a 19th-century chapel. Turns out 'cloud computing' was just a mistranslation of 'cathedral computing' all along. At least when the cooling system fails, you can always open the stained glass windows and pray to the patron saint of uptime
The Cathedral and the Bazaar finally reconciled: SLURM queues behind stained glass, K8s pods in the cloud - both require faith, but only one has a change freeze in the liturgy
Proof that on‑prem isn’t dead: we literally built a church around our SLURM queue so the InfiniBand has lower latency than praying to the cloud
Uptime that rivals the cathedral's survival through plagues, wars, and Y2K - now that's mainframe HA
For the name of the Master, the Slave and the Holy Git, commit. Comment deleted
oh no, you have used the forbidden terminology! please use primary/secondary immediately Comment deleted
Oh no, don't cancel me on X, please.(((( Comment deleted
Heaven Comment deleted
For the Glory of the Omnissiah Comment deleted
approx total cost of just GPUs: $120M 🫠 Comment deleted
God willing Comment deleted
Ah, the fabulous MareNostrum supercomputer! I heard that a muslim mosque can occupy any building that is beautiful enough, including a former christian church. It looks like the same holds true for IT temples. 🤓 Comment deleted
MareNostrum mentioned 🥹 Comment deleted
A german documentation about it https://youtu.be/DcbMW_P466o?si=zrn8KUA4CL8Dbuj7 Comment deleted
How can I join this religion? Comment deleted
Depending on which project are those cogitators being used. Trust me, brother. I know the choirs Comment deleted
I was there twice, the vibes it gives IRL are actually amazing Comment deleted