CRAY XE6 Hardware and Architecture

Hardware of Installation step 1

• 3552 compute nodes / 113.664 cores
  • dual socket G34
    • 2x AMD Opteron(tm) 6200 Series Processor (Interlagos) with 16 Cores @ 2.3 GHz
    • 32MB L2+L3 Cache, 16MB L3 Cache
    • HyperTransport HT3, 6.4GT/s=102.4 GB/s
    • per socket ~150 GFLOP/s
  • 32GB memory and 64GB memory nodes
• 96 service nodes (Network nodes, mom nodes, router nodes, DVS nodes, boot, database, syslog)
• High Speed Network CRAY Gemini
• Parallel Filesystem
  • Lustre
  • capacity 2.7 PB
  • IO bandwith ~150GB/s
• infrastructure servers
• Users HOME filesystem ~60TB (BLUEARC mercury 55)
• special user nodes:
  • external login servers
  • pre-post processing nodes
  • remote visualization nodes

Architecture

• System Management Workstation (SMW)
  • system administrator's console for managing a Cray system like monitoring, installing/upgrading software, controls the hardware, starting and stopping the XE6 system.

• service nodes are classified in:
  • login nodes for users to access the system
  • boot nodes which provides the OS for all other nodes, licenses,...
  • network nodes which provides e.g. external network connections for the compute nodes
  • Cray Data Virtualization Service (DVS): is an I/O forwarding service that can parallelize the I/O transactions of an underlying POSIX-compliant file system.
  • sdb node for services like ALPS, torque, moab, cray management services,...
  • I/O nodes for e.g. lustre
  • MOM (torque) nodes for placing user jobs of the batch system in to execution

• compute nodes and pre-post processing nodes
  • are only available for user using the batch system and the Application Level Placement Scheduler (ALPS), see running applications.

Conceptual Architecture

Features

• Cray Linux Environment (CLE) 4.? operating system
• Operating System is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
• Cray Gemini interconnection network
• Cluster Compatibility Mode (CCM) functionality enables cluster-based independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run without modification on Cray systems.
• Batch System: torque, moab
• many development tools available:
  • Compiler: Cray, PGI, GNU,
  • Debugging: DDT, ATP,...
  • Performance Analysis: CrayPat, Cray Apprentice, PAPI
  • Libraries: BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW, PETSc, MPT,....

Pictures