Decommissioned High-Performance Computing Systems

Stokes pre-upgrade, December 2008 - August 2010

In August 2010 the original Stokes system was significantly upgraded. Prior to the upgrade it was made up of 320 8 core Intel Xeon E5462 processors with a total of 5120 GB of RAM. The system achieved a peak Linpack performance of 25.11 TFlop and had a peak performance of 28.67 TFlop. The upgrade was done by swapping the compute node blades, network, storage and chassis equipment was retained.

Lanczos, January 2008 - July 2010

Lanczos was a system based on a single cabinet of IBM Blue Gene/L. The system used PowerPC 440 processors running at 700Mhz, providing 2048 cores with 1TB of RAM.

It featured the powerful Blue Gene Tree/Torus network. The system achieved a peak Linpack performance of 4.74 TFlop and had a peak performance of 5.73 TFlop.

Walton, September 2005 - November 2008

Walton was an IBM Cluster 1350 consisting of 479 IBM e326 compute nodes. Each compute node was a dual AMD Opteron 250 - 2.4 GHz single core CPUs with a 1MB level 2 cache. 415 of these nodes have 4 GB of RAM, while the remaining 64 nodes had 8 GB RAM.

The nodes were connected together with Gigabit Ethernet using a Force10 E600 switch. Storage was provided via the IBM GPFS parallel filesystem running on a set of dedicated storage servers connected to an IBM DS4500 storage controller. An addtional 14 nodes provided load-balanced login, cluster management, scheduling, filesystem and other facilities for the cluster.

The system achieved a peak Linpack performance of 3.142 TFlop and had a peak performance of 4.464 TFlop.

Hamilton, September 2005 - November 2008

Hamilton was a Bull NovaScale 6320 that provided 32 Intel Itanium2 CPUs and 256 GB of RAM as a single system image. Each CPU ran at 1.5 GHz and had 6 MB of L3 cache.

The processors were connected using a three tier NUMA topology providing excellent inter-process communication via shared memory. Storage was provided by 9 TB of directly attached disks. This provides optimal performance for codes using large scratch files.

Hamilton had a Bull NovaScale 4400 for use as a login node with 4 more Itanium2 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM for compilation, batch submission along with pre- and post- processing.