High Performance Computing

The Facility

The cluster comprises a mix of hardware from the SRIF2 and SRIF3 procurements. The newer hardware comprises 200 compute nodes, each with 2 quad-core processors (Intel Xeon E5472 3.0GHz), providing a total of 1,600 cores. All compute nodes are linked by a fast InfiniBand network, suitable for running extremely parallel, scientific codes. The new cluster is capable of running at over 12 teraflops (12 million million calculations per second). The newer compute nodes each have at least 16GB memory, with 32 having 32GB.

The older hardware is still capable of running a wide variety of codes well. More than 400 compute nodes, containing 2 opteron processors, and at least 2GB memory are available, meaning the entire facility offers over 2400 compute cores.

Storage of over 100TB, mostly high performance parallel storage, is shared over the entire facility.

Note: currently, only the newer hardware (200 compute nodes each with 2 quad core Xeons) is available. This represents about 2/3rds of the compute cores, and 80% of the computing power of the whole facility.