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During the spring of 2004 HPC2N bought a new large cluster based on the 64-bit AMD Opteron CPU from HP. The acquisition was made possible through a generous donation from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
The cluster consists of 384 CPUs in 192 dual nodes connected with a
Myrinet-2000 High-performance interconnect. The cluster achived
1.33 Tflops/s on HP Linpack benchmark, the highest recorded in Sweden
to date. In addition to offer the highest perfomance, the cluster also
boasts a total of over 1.5 Terabyte of memory. All in all this makes it
the most powerful computer in Sweden.
The AMD Opteron is a 64-bit CPU with excellent performance, especially in
dual and multiprocessor configurations. The CPUs in the new HPC2N cluster
runs at 2.2 GHz giving a peak performance of 4.4 Gflops/s for each CPU,
giving a total of 1.69 Tflops/s peak performance.
Of the 192 nodes in the cluster 190 are identically configured compute nodes
based on the HP Proliant DL145 server. Each compute node includes 2 AMD 248
Opteron CPUs running at 2.2 GHz, 8 Gigabyte of RAM and 80 GB hardisk. Each
node also connects to the Gigabit ethernet communication network and to the
Myrinet high-performance network.
The remaining two nodes in the cluster serve as access-server and management
server respectively. Their configuration is similar to the compute nodes,
but based instead on the HP proliant DL585 server.
The high-performance network is a Myrinet-2000 network connecting all 192 nodes
in the cluster. The network is switched which gives similar performance between
each pair of nodes. The performance offered is a bandwidth of about 250 MB/s
and a latency of a few microseconds. Each of the nodes are connected with a
PCI-X adapter card, taking full advantage of the speed of the PCI-X bus.
In order to take advantage of the superior performance offered by the 64-bit CPUs, the software needs to fully support the 64-bit architecture, though old 32-bit software will probably still work. The system
runs Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. In addition to gcc, development
tools from the Portland Group with full 64-bit support ensures that user can take
full advantage of the 64-bit architecture.
Further information
The software installation was done using FAI, Fully Automatic
Installation.
If you have any questions about the new cluster please send a mail to either
info@hpc2n.umu.se (non technical questions) or
support@hpc2n.umu.se (technical questions)
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