Hardware

The cluster consists of 10 BladeCenters á 14 compute nodes ("blade servers", each inside a "blade", an only 1 inch high box). Each blade server consists of

• 2x Intel XEON Quad-Core processor chips (2.83GHz)
  
  • 256 KB L1-Cache
  • 12 MB L2-Cache
• 16 GB main memory
• 140 GB hard drive
• Gigabit-Ethernet and Infiniband network adapter
  

In all, 1120 cores are available on 140 compute nodes. The most expensive part, the Infiniband switch, allows a very fast inter-process communication between the compute nodes. An additional Gigabit Ethernet is used for administration of the cluster and for input/output (reading from and writing to files).

Back side of the Infiniband switch

The latest component is an HP-SPS storage system. It is equipped with a Lustre filesystem and provides 32 TByte of disk space.

A few hard drives of the storage system