Summary of resources in our HPC systems (Phase I)
| System Name |
CHPC Blue Gene/P |
iQudu |
Impala/Tshepe |
Manufacturer/
Model |
IBM Blue Gene/P |
IBM e1350 Cluster |
IBM P690 |
CPU |
Power PC |
AMD Opteron |
Power4+ |
CPU Clock |
850 MHz |
2.6 GHz |
1.9 GHz |
CPU Cores |
4096 |
2048 |
32 |
Memory |
2048 |
16GB |
32GB |
Peak Performance |
14 TFlops |
3.3 TFlops |
- |
Linpack Performance |
11.5 TFlops |
2.65 TFlops |
- |
Interconnect |
Blue Gene
Tree/Torus |
Gigabit Ethernet |
N/A |
Storage (formatted capacity) |
94 TB (Multi-cluster) |
94 TB (Multi-cluster) |
94 TB (NFS) |
Launch date |
October 2008 |
2007 |
2007 |
| IQUDU - e1350 Linux high-speed computer cluster with 160 nodes |
 |
Hardware |
-
Each node is equipped with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2.6GHz Rev. F processors (640 CPUs in total at approximately 2.5 Teraflops/s peak performance) and 16GB of DDR2 667MHz random access memory.
-
The nodes are interconnected with the shared-file system of the SAN, accessed over the Infiniband 4X SDR 10 GB cluster via HTX from Voltaire and PathScale.
-
Eight of the cluster nodes are equipped with ClearSpeed accelerator cards
-
In addition to local hard disks, all nodes have access to a shared storage system with a capacity of 94TB via a General Parallel File System (GPFS)
|
The cluster platform, aptly called "iQudu" (isiXhosa for Kudu), symbolises the agility, speed and size of the cluster.
|
| IMPALA and TSHEPE -
Two P690 SMP machines |
 |
Hardware |
IBM donated two separate shared-memory computers with 32 x 1.9GHz Power4+ CPUs and at least 32GB of RAM each. The two SMPs are called Tshepe (Sesotho for a Springbuck) and Impala (isiZulu for a red buck).
Only one machine (either Impala or Tshepe) is used at a time. The machine has access to the shared IBM GPFS storage system of 94 TB over the NFS mount. |
| BLUE GENE/P |
 |
Hardware
|
As part of IBM's Global Innovation Outlook and the IBM-CHPC partnership, the CHPC hosts a rack of Blue Gene (BG4A) donated by IBM (Blue Gene for Africa project). The Blue Gene®/P system is capable of 14 trillion individual calculations per second, and is five times more powerful than the second-fastest research computer on the African continent (in Egypt). The Blue Gene®/P provides 1024 compute nodes, each with four fully cache-coherent cores and 2GB RAM. The cores run at 850MHz. These nodes provide three modes of operation for jobs:
- SMP - a single MPI task with support for four threads
- Dual - two MPI tasks with support for two threads each
- Virtual Node - four MPI tasks
|
Phase II
The Phase II computational resource is scheduled to be installed by the end of June 2009. The peak performance of the new platform is approximately 30 Teraflops/s, with an anticipated storage capacity of more than 400 Terabytes.
Maintenance
The CHPC cluster environment will go down for maintenance every last Wednesday of the month. Maintenance calendar
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