Supercomputers have many applications, including modelling simulations, performing complex scientific calculations, and rendering high definition 3D graphics.

iVEC operates multiple supercomputers that use complementary technologies. These include traditional CPUs and GPU accelerators.

The supercomputing hardware currently managed by iVEC includes Epic and Fornax.

Epic

Epic is a HP commodity linux cluster housed in a Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD). It runs CentOS Linux. It comprises 25 HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures each of which contains 16 double-dense HP ProLiant BL2x220c G6 blades.

Each of the compute node (blade) contains two hex-core Intel Xeon X5660 processors operating at 2.8 GHz with 24 GB of RAM. In total, there are 800 compute nodes providing 9600 cores and 18 TB of RAM to iVEC researchers. Each node contains a quad data rate (QDR) Infiniband card.

Fornax

Fornax is Latin for “furnace” and is the name of a southern hemisphere constellation identified by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. This name is representative of the supercomputer’?s capability for dealing with data-intensive problems, which is expected to be of particular use to the radio astronomy computing community.

The SGI supercomputer comprises 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU and 72 GB RAM, resulting in a system containing 1152 cores and 96 GPUs.

The system also has a 500 TB global filesystem, in addition to each node having 7 TB of local disk space. One distinguishing feature of the system, allowing it to tackle data-intensive problems, is the presence of two InfiniBand networks. The first allows each node to access the global filesystem, while the second allows access to neighbouring nodes. This dual-rail system also allows separation of MPI traffic from storage traffic.