published on Thursday, December 22, 2005

SARA doubles capacity of National Compute Cluster

By the end of December, SARA - in collaboration with Dell - will start with the extension of the National Compute Cluster in the SARA data center in Almere. This extension is expected to be operational by the end of March 2006. With the extension, the total computing capacity of the cluster will increase to a theoretical peak performance of more than 8.5 Tflop/s. The National Compute Cluster is an important addition to the nationally available supercomputing capacity. SARA is responsible for the housing and system management of the cluster, and gives support to the users of the system.

The extension takes place in collaboration with several new partners, such as the Vrije Universiteit (VU) and a number of NWO institutes, among which the FOM institutes. (FOM means Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter). The Netherlands National Computing Facilities foundation subsidizes the extension. Through NCF more capacity becomes available on a national level. Up to 31 December 2005, the new partners make use of the IBM supercomputer that is hosted by SARA. The extension of the National Compute Cluster will replace this system for the greater part.

The participation of new partners illustrates that the new cluster has flexibility and expansion possibilities that are required to facilitate the demands of parties in need of advanced computing power. The extension of the National Compute Cluster offers economy of scale for the current partners of the cluster, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), foundation Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) and NCF.

The current cluster has 275 nodes: (Dell PowerEdge™ 1850 servers). Each node has two Intel® Xeon™ processors with Intel® EM64T technology with 3.4 GHz and 1 MByte Level II cache. Each node has 2 GByte internal memory. The operating system is Linux. The nodes intercommunicate via InfiniBand: a low-latency, high-bandwidth network.

The upgrade consists of several parts: to the existing cluster 256 nodes will be added with the InfiniBand network and 100 nodes without. The 100 nodes without InfiniBand are dedicated for non-parallel applications for which InfiniBand has no added value. The processors will be of the same fabric as the above-mentioned, but will have 2 MByte Level II cache. The new nodes have 4 GByte of memory.

The cluster will be configured as one large cluster, so that maximized flexibility and performance can be offered to the users. The on-line disk capacity will be extended with 15 TB to a total of 25 TB. After completion of this operation, the National Compute Cluster will consist of 1270 processors (635 nodes), so that its theoretical peak performance will increase from 3.7 to 8.5 Tflop/s.