NEC Cluster cacau introduction

This platform serves the following purpose. It enables development and computation of parallel programs on the Intel Xeon processors with Intel EM64T Technology. The two major parallel programming standards MPI and OpenMP are supported. Please note that you must limit the execution time of your jobs during daytime to guarantee the short turn around times that are necessary for development.

Hardware and Architecture

The HWW Xeon EM64T cluster platform consists of one front node for interactive access (cacau.hww.de) and several nodes for execution of parallel programs. The cluster consists of 210 dual CPU nodes with 3.2GHz/3.0GHz Xeon EM64T CPU's + 2/8/16/32 GByte memory on the nodes and two 2way frontend node with 2 Xeon EM64T 3.2GHz CPU's + 6GByte memory. Additionally a RAID system with 8 TByte and a GPFS with 15 TByte is available. The local disks of each node (58 GByte) serves as scratch disks.

Features:

• Cluster of 210 dual SMPs nodes NEC servers with 2/8/16/32 GByte memory
• Frontend node is a 2way NEC Express5800/120Rg-2 server with 6GByte memory
• Node-Node interconnect Voltaire Infiniband(Switch:ISR9288) Network + Gigabit Ethernet
• Disk 8 TByte home/shared scratch + 1.2 TByte local scratch + 15 TByte GPFS parallel Filesystem
• Batch system: Torque, Maui scheduler
• Operating System: Tao Linux release 1 (Mooch Update 2)
• NEC HPC Linux software packages
• Intel Compilers
• Voltaire MPI
• Switcher/Module

Peak Performance: 	        3.9 TFLOP/s
Cores/node: 	                4
Memory: 	                1 TB
Shared Disk: 	                24 TB 
Local Disks/node: 	        80 GB
Number of Nodes: 	        212
Node-node data transfer rate: 	10 Gbps(Full bisectional: 20Gbps) infiniband

Short overview of installed nodes