CACR’s Shared Heterogeneous Cluster (SHC) Now Online

The nature of financial support for high-end computing resources has evolved given the widespread adoption of Beowulf clusters. Research groups that need computing often obtain funds for clusters as part of their grants. CACR participates in some of these efforts, and supports significant dedicated resources for high-energy physics, astronomy, geophysics, physics-based simulation, and others. Unfortunately, the balkanization of computation by this model has created inefficiencies. The clusters do not take advantage of economies of scale, can be underutilized, and poorly administered. CACR has developed a shared cluster model, and Professors Paul Dimotakis, Dan Meiron, and Kip Thorne have agreed to be pioneer partners in this effort. CACR has purchased a machine optimized for parallel numerical codes that can sustain over 1 trillion floating point operations per second. It consists of 352 2.2Ghz AMD Opteron cores, 700+ Gigabytes of memory, all interconnected by an Infiniband networking fabric that can move 160+ Gigabytes/s between the compute nodes. The cluster is administered by CACR with funds from the partner groups, and each group has an allocation of time on the machine proportionate to its contribution. By sharing, the groups get better pricing from vendors, professional systems administration by experienced CACR staff, and the ability to use a much larger machine than each group could afford separately. Some of the partners are also supporting efforts at CACR in visualization and code tuning. The shared cluster model is extremely scalable, and CACR is interested in expanding the machine to increase simulation capability and add support for data intensive science. Please contact CACR’s Executive Director, Mark Stalzer (stalzer at caltech.edu) for more information.