Penguin Cluster

HPC and Cloud infrastructure

Currently our primary system is Marconi, a 512 core cluster from Penguin Computing. It has 32 nodes, each with two 8-core AMD CPU’s running at 3.0 Ghz. These are connected with Quad Data Rate (QDR) Infiniband at 40 Gigabits per second.This system is capable of 6.1 Teraflops.

Primary storage ( /home ) for Marconi is a 77 TB Dot Hill 3533 system that serves data via NFS over the Infiniband network for excellent performance. Each node also has a 1 TB hard disk that is mounted at /scratch for cases where local disk accesses is helpful.

As usage on the system grows, so will the system.

Visualization system

Our visualization system is back online after an upgrade and move to the new data center. It has 16 2.2Ghz AMD cores, 128 GB of RAM and a GeForce 8800 GTX GPU for 3D rendering and GPU code development. It runs VirtualGL software and VNC to allow for VNC connections to render graphics using the servers GPU rather than sending OpenGL calls across the network to be rendered on the VNC client machine. This provides extremely fast 3D visualization with only minimal hardware requirements for the VNC client.

Shared Memory system

The SGI Altix 3700 BX2 system is in operation. This system has 64 1600 Mhz Itanium2 processors and 256 GB of RAM in a single OS image. While this is a fairly old system it still competes well with the latest systems when running some applications. Particularly with large models that have a lot of communication between processes. This system is not heavily used right now so we keep it powered off until someone wants to use it.  Please send an email to  Steve Cousins to request that this system to be powered up.