Calgary: New Linux Cluster

Monday, 09 Aug 2004

CGD's latest cluster, Calgary, is open for business.

Calgary is a smaller cluster with similar hardware to Bangkok, with the addition of Infiniband as a network fabric. To make use of the Infinband, codes must be compiled with the "mpich*-ib" variant. CAM showed a 10% increase in performance using the Infiniband over the gigabit-ethernet fabric. Greater increases are expected once more nodes are added to the fabric. YMMV.

Calgary also has hyper threading turned on, so each node appears to have 4 CPUs. Use "-l nodes=<#nodes>:ppn=4" to increase the job density per node.

Calgary jobs can still run over the gig-e without problems.

The CGD Cluster FAQ is located at:

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/systems/documentation/faqs/CGD_Cluster.html

If there are any questions, let me know.

Calgary Details

Dell Precision 450
CPU: 2 x 3.06 GHz Intel Xeon w/ 512k cache
Memory: 2 GByte
Disk: 40 GB disk w/ 18 GByte available for scratch per node.
240 GB disk is available as shared disk space for all nodes.
Cluster Network: Gigabit ethernet and Infiniband.
Uplink to non-cluster NFS mounts (ie, /data, /project): 1000Mb/s.

If you have any questions, email Mark Moore..