Dense Memory Cluster (DMC)
The DMC at the Alabama Supercomputer Center has 1800 CPU cores and 10 terabytes of distributed memory. Each compute node has a local disk (up to 1.9 terabytes of which are accessible as /tmp). Also attached to the DMC is a high performance Panasas file server, which has 17 terabytes of high performance storage accessible as /scratch from each node. Home directories as well as third party applications use a separate Panasas Filesystem and share 47 terabytes of storage.
The machine is physically configured as a set of 8 or 16 CPU core SMP boards. Forty nodes have 2.3 GHz quad-core AMD Opterons and 64 gigabytes of memory. Ninety-six nodes have 2.26 GHz Intel quad-core Nehalem processors. Forty nodes have 2.3 GHz AMD 8-core Opteron processors and 128 gigabytes of memory.
The DMC has sixteen GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) chips. These are a
combination of: two Tesla S1070 units (external GPUs connected in pairs to four
DMC nodes); four DMC nodes configured with a pair of Tesla M2070 cards each.
These multicore GPU chips are similar to those in video cards, but are
installed as math coprocessors. This can give significant performance
advantages for software that has been adapted to use these processors. Thus
the processing capacity of the DMC cluster is:
Conventional processing capacity - 16.46 TFLOPs
Single precision GPU capacity - 18.6 TFLOPs
Double precision GPU capacity - 4.8 TFLOPs