Sun Fire Cluster
The Sun Fire Cluster consists of Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) systems based on the UltraSPARC-IV+ line of processors and the Solaris Operating Environment. All cluster nodes are currently running Solaris 10, Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1, Sun GridEngine 6.0 Enterprise Edition, and Sun Studio 12 and are connected using Gigabit ethernet. For details, see our Sun Fire Cluster page.
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Victoria Falls Cluster
The Victoria Falls Cluster consists of 73 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers. These nodes include two 1.2 Ghz UltraSparc T2+ chips each. Each of the chips has 8 compute cores, and each core is capable of Chip Multi Threading with 8 hardware threads. This means that each of the nodes is capable of working simultaneously on up to 128 threads. See details on our Victoria Falls page.
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M9000 Cluster
The M9000 Cluster is comprised of eight new SMP machines that are Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Servers which Sun Microsystems built in partnership with Fujitsu. Each of these servers consists of 64 quad-core 2.52 Ghz Sparc64 VII processors. Each of these chips has 4 compute cores, and each core is capable of Chip Multi Threading with 2 hardware threads. This means that each of the servers is capable of working simultaneously on up to 512 threads. See details on our Sun M9000 page.
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HPCVL Workup Facilities
HPCVL operates workup nodes on most of the member institutions. These are meant for local login, for compilation of source code, preparation of input and processing of output. To a limited degree, they can also be used for short test runs of application software before submitting to the main production clusters. See details on our Workup Facilities page.
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Specialized Resources
HPCVL also operates a Gridrack consisting of 20 - Sun X4100 servers. These resources are reserved for specialty projects such as SNO and SNOLabs at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
Gridrack Configuration:
20 - Dual CPU/Dual Core 2.4 GHz Opteron Sun Fire X4100 Servers
1 - Dual Core Sun Fire X2100 Server acting as the Login node
All nodes have 4 Gigabytes of RAM available
Gigabit ethernet interconnect
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File Storage: Disk
Disk storage for software applications and user home directories, temporary space, scratch, and long term is provided by 24 TB, 12 TB, 12 TB, and 28 TB respectively of Sun StorEdge 3510 disk technology. We are now using Sun SAM-QFS (v4.5) High Performance HPC system to manage the arrays.
Two Sun Fire V890s act as the SAM-QFS servers for the Sun Fire cluster and serve the storage. The global scratch space is available to all nodes in the cluster via SAM-QFS. For more information on the File System, please read the File System FAQ. .
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File Storage: Tape
Tape storage is attached as part of our SAM-QFS set up. A Sun StorEdge L1400 tape library containing 2 x 650 x 400 GB tapes (native capacity of 1.04 PB) with an effective capacity of 520 TB. For more information, please check out our File System FAQ..
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File Storage: Backup
We are currently backing up User's home directories for a period of ONE Month after which, the disk space will be recycled.
We have deployed a large DLT (digital linear tape) tape backup system using Sun StorEdge L1400 tape library. We have implemented a backup and retrieval strategy of user files located in each users home directory (i.e., all files/directories referenced by the $HOME environment variable).
See the File System FAQ for details.
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Software Environment Software Environment
Currently all Sun servers run the 64-bit Solaris 10 Operating Environment. Additional installed software includes:
Native Sun Studio 12 compilers for Fortran, C, and C++, together with a complete software development environment, which includes a complete set of graphical and command line tools to help you build, debug, run, and tune your high performance applications.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 6.0, 7.1 and 8.1 are suites of applications and libraries for high performance software development of parallel applications based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and capapble on running on clusters as well as on parallel shared-memory machines and combinations of both.
Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Enterprise Edition is a distributed workload manager that optimizes utilization of software and hardware resources in heterogeneous networked environments. Its use is mandatory for scheduling production jobs on HPCVL clusters.
A great variety of application software is pre-installed on HPCVL clusters. The applications range from computational quantum chemistry to finite-element analysis, from mathematical and statistical libraries to computational fluid dynamics, and from ab-initio molecular dynamics to solid-state physics.
Please see our software pages for information about individual software packages and pointers to specific FAQ files.
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