The document discusses the key factors in designing a high performance computing system: bandwidth, throughput, IOPS, and FLOPS. It describes a project to design a system to run seismic processing jobs within 50 days. The system was designed around the tasks, with 1250 dual-socket quad-core nodes, a 10 GigE network, and direct-connected disk storage. Initial startup problems were resolved by staggering job starts and optimizing I/O. The completed system met the project needs and was able to handle additional workloads.