Platforms

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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