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 344 CPUs in 172 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. Note that it contained more nodes then than it does now. In addition to offer the highest performance, 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  1.51 (1.69 while at max node count) Tflops/s peak performance.

Of the 172 nodes in the cluster, 170 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.

Note: This cluster is no longer covered by any support contract. That means nodes are being turned off as they break down. It originally had 384 processors in 190 nodes, and 1.54 TB RAM.

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).