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Hardware Overview

Description of Linux Cluster Tornado

Please note: it is planned to decommission Tornado on 2012-07-19. We kindly ask you to consider this in your project schedules. Our recommendation is to move your projects to Blizzard and Lizard in time. Please refer to the documentation for further informations about these systems.

The Tornado system is a cluster, and this means that it is a collection of essentially independent computer nodes that are interconnected with a (high-speed) network. Storage of files used and/or produced by computations is provided by a high-capacity parallel file-system, accessible by all nodes. From a hardware point of view, the cluster's conceptual organization corresponds to that of the following illustration:

Tornado Overview

As shown above, all nodes of the Tornado cluster are interconnected by an Infiniband network, the centerpiece of which is a 288-port infiniband switch. The nodes of the cluster are naturally divided into login, compute, and storage nodes. Descriptions of the cluster's different categories of components now follow:

Login and compute nodes

  • Sun X4600 (5 Nodes)
    • The Sun X4600 are used as login nodes and compute servers for serial and SMP (OpenMP parallelized or multithreaded applications) jobs.

    • processors

      8 x AMD Opteron model 885, 2.6 GHz (16 cores in total)

      memory

      64 GB RAM

      disks

      2 x 73 Gbytes local disk (system only)

  • Sun X2200M2 (256 Nodes)

    • The Sun X2200 M2 are building the major component of the cluster by providing the standard compute nodes.

      processors

      2 x AMD Opteron model 2384, 2.7 GHz (8 cores in total)

      memory

      32 GB RAM

      disks

      1 x 250 Gbytes local disk (system only)

Storage nodes and storage devices

  • Sun X4500
    • The Sun X4500 are used as OSS (Object Storage Servers). Sixteen are available for the Lustre filesystems. The Lustre filesystem has an capacity of more than 370 TBytes.
  • toss01-08:

    • processors

      2 x AMD Opteron model 285, 2.6 GHz (4 cores in total)

      memory

      8 GB RAM

      disks

      2 x 73 Gbytes local disk (system only)
  • toss09:

    • processors

      2 x AMD Opteron model 290, 2.8 GHz (4 cores in total)

      memory

      16 GB RAM

      disks

      2 x 500 Gbytes local disk (system only)
  • toss10-16:

    • processors

      2 x AMD Opteron model 2356, 1.2 GHz (8 cores in total)

      memory

      32 GB RAM

      disks

      2 x 1 TBytes local disk (system only)
  • Sun X2100
    • There are two of this systems available and they are responsible for mainitaining the so-called meta-data (ie., file creation/modification times, access protection flags, etc., and in case of the present file system also directories themselves) associated with the file content stored on the X4500s. Each one of the pair of systems is referred to as a Meta-Data Server (MDS).

      processors

      2 x AMD Opteron model 285, 2.6 GHz (4 cores in total)

      memory

      8 GB RAM

      disks

      2 x 73 Gbytes local disk (system only)

    Connected to this system is, in a fail-over configuration a RAID-system (a Sun StorEdge 3320 SCSI Array), containing 5 x 146 GB 15,000 rpm SCSI disks. This device is connected to and accessible by both MDS systems, and its purpose is to store all metadata related to file content stored on the X4500.

Interconnects and switches

  • Infiniband network
  • Ethernet network
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