Chimera Hardware Description

• the vendor is Penguin Computing
• the cluster is rack-mounted, comprising 3 racks
• it has 1 head node + 66 compute nodes
• each compute node fits in one rack unit and has:
  • 4 AMD Opteron "Magny Cors" 6164HE 12-core 1.7GHz CPUs
    • for a total of 48 cores in the node
    • a total of 48*66=3168 cores available for computation (excluding head node)
    • the "HE" is the ~~high energy efficient~~ version of the CPU
  • 1 1TB hard drive
    • 7200RPM SATA2
    • intended to be used primarily as scratch space during a computation
  • 1 Mellanox ConnectX-2 dual-port network interface adapter
    • supports Quad Data Rate 40Gb/s Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet
    • MHZH29-XTR product fact sheet
• memory
  • 8 of the compute nodes have __128GB__ RAM each
  • the remaining compute nodes have __64GB__ RAM each
  • the 8 nodes with 128GB RAM are intended for those applications that don't scale so well to thousands of cores
  • the RAM is all in 4GB DIMMS; the 64GB nodes just have half of the slots empty
  • it is possible in the future to bring any or all of the 64GB nodes up to 128GB if funds become available; currently, the cost is about $2411 to do this for one node
  • a total of 8*128GB + 58*64GB = __4,736GB__ memory (excluding head node)
• head node
  • similar to the 64GB compute nodes, but with only two CPUs instead of 4
  • it will only be used for logging on, compiling, administration, and so forth
• interconnect
  • the nodes are networked using QDR Infiniband
  • all the nodes are connected to a Mellanox Infiniband switch
    • Mellanox IS5100
  • an additional 10Gig Ethernet network and switch are in the works