A New Nehalem HPC Cluster Arrives at the EEC

The HPC team has been utilizing the EEC for the past 6 months or so to perform benchmarking tests.  These tests have enabled them to provide quality data to customers interested in utilizing the Windows HPC Server solution to handle their computing needs.  This program has been extremely successful and the HPC team will be releasing some information shortly on the work they have been doing.

As we move into FY10, the HPC team has joined forces with IBM, Mellanox, other leading IHV’s and the EEC to increase their HPC benchmarking environment. Part of that new environment has just arrived at the EEC and is awaiting the finalization of our remodel so it can be racked and stacked (see the picture below of the boxes). The systems are all based on Latest Intel Nehalem Xeon 5500 series.

More information on the systems:

·         64 IBM iDataPlex DX360 M2 compute nodes and one IBM System x3650 M2 head node.  24GB DDR3 RAM per node. Total 512 cores.

·         6 36-port QDR InfiniBand switches, 72 QDR InfiniBand Adapters, copper and optical cables for a fully connected non-blocking QDR IB fabric.

·         IBM GPFS on 4 IBM System x3650 M2 storage nodes w/ QDR InfiniBand and IBM/etc storage

Picture of the boxes waiting to be unpacked

The EEC and the HPC team will be working together to help our customers and partners utilize these systems later in CY09.

Josh Adams

Program Manager - EEC