High Performance Computer HP XC6000
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The computing center of University Karlsruhe operates a HP XC6000 as high performance computer of the federal state Baden-Württemberg. This parallel computer based on Itanium2 processors will be provided for projects from the universities of our federal state requiring computing power which can not be satisfied by local resources and is also available to users from private enterprises against refund of costs. |
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Configuration of HP XC6000
Nodes of HP XC6000 may have different roles. In Karlsruhe there are
- 2 login nodes each with 8 processors,
- 101 compute nodes each with 2 processors,
- 10 compute nodes each with 8 processors,
- a few service nodes for resource management etc.,
- 8 file server nodes each with 2 processors with a netto capacity of 10 TB and
a fast Quadrics QsNet II Interconnect.
The HP XC6000 is a distributed memory parallel computer with 128 nodes all in all; 108 nodes consist of 2 Intel Itanium2 processors with a frequency of 1.5 GHz and 12 nodes consist of 8 Intel Itanium2 processors with a frequency of 1.6 GHz and all nodes own local memory, local disks and network adapters. Thus the theoretical peak performance of the system is 1.9 TFLOPS. The main memory above all compute node is about 2 TB. Additionally special nodes are attached as file servers to the cluster to support a fast and scalable parallel filesystem. All nodes are connected to the Quadrics QsNet II interconnect that shows a high bandwidth of more than 800 MB/s and a low latency.
The basic operating system on each node is HP XC Linux for High Performance Computing (HPC), a Linux implementation which is compatible to RedHat AS 4.0. On top of this operating system a set of open source as well as proprietary software components constitute the XC software environment enabling the efficient useage of the parallel computer .
As global filesystem the scalable, parallel filesystem Lustre is used withhin the XC cluster. By the useage of several Lustre Object Storage Target (OST) servers and Meta Data Servers (MDS) both high scalability and redundancy are reached in case of malfunction of single servers. At present 10 TB disk space is available within the global filesystem. Besides each node of HP XC6000 is equipped with local disks for temporary data.
More detailled description of the nodes:
108 nodes each with 2 Intel Itanium2 processors and 12 GB main memory and 146 GB local disk space; 12 nodes each with 8 Intel Itanium2 processors and 64 GB main memory and about 500 GB local disk space; 8 2-way file server nodes based on Xeon processors with attached disks of the overall size of 10 TB.
Access to HP XC6000
Only secure methods like secure shell (ssh) and the corresponding secure copy (scp) are permitted to login and to copy data respectively to HP XC6000. Access via telnet and rsh respectively as well as further r-commands is cut off because of security problems. To login to HP XC6000 the following command should be used:
ssh user-id@xc1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
To login on XC1 an account is necessary. Employees of University Karlsruhe have to fill a form, that can be downloaded from the website http://www.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/download/downloads, and send it (per fax or mail) to BIT8000. Employees of "Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe" contact Mrs. Lang from IWR ("Institut für Wissenschaftliches Rechnen").
Important Informations for the Usage of HP XC6000
- Brief Information for new Users
Short introduction how to access HP XC6000 at University of Karlsruhe. - HP XC6000 User Guide
Further Informations on HP XC6000
Article on HP XC6000 in the Computing Center's newsletter RZ-NEWS (in German):
Contact on HP XC6000 at University Karlsruhe.