A Terabyte Analysis Machine for SDSS data

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey data has driven us to design the Terabyte Analysis Machine, a high-I/O compute cluster built on a cluster of commodity computers, a fiber channel network, and a large disk tower; on Linux, on a new cluster file system called GFS, and on the sophisticated SX database. Our initial implementation is a 7 dual processor nodes with 500 Gb of local disk and 730 Gb of global disk. We expect to use the TAM to search the first 1000 sq-degrees of the SDSS for clusters of galaxies.