May 10, 2004
The UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory, home to the
NIH Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics
(RBVI),
has recently acquired a Hewlett-Packard (HP)
AlphaServer GS1280
computer to provide for the compute- and data-intensive needs of our user community.
The AlphaServer GS1280 is a high-end server with 32 processors
organized in a symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) architecture.
This system is identical to the AlphaServer GS1280
supercomputing cluster
recently installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center,
although that system has 128 processors.
The GS1280 provides the RBVI with a state-of-the-art
high performance computing platform.
The system has thirty-two 1.15 GHz Alpha EV7 processors and 64 GB of memory,
for a peak performance of 58.5 Gigaflops
(based on the Linpack 1000x1000 benchmark).
The system has exceptional memory bandwidth (12.3 GB per second per processor),
five to ten times greater than comparable products as reported in the
STREAM benchmark.
The memory system is organized in a
ccNUMA
architecture with a maximum latency between any processor and memory
of 247 ns. Additional
performance
overview data on the GS1280 system is available,
as is a detailed technical summary.
A 5-minute Windows Media Player
video clip
describes the architectural elements of the GS1280 system.
(You can download Windows Media Player
here.
Other more detailed video clips on the GS1280 are
also available.)
The GS1280 has been added to our existing socrates cluster as node "guanine."
Since there are more processors and memory available on this node than
the other cluster nodes, many services (including interactive logins)
have been relocated to now run on guanine. The
TruCluster Server
clustering technology we employ provides for substantially more reliability
than would otherwise be possible with a single computing system, since single
node failures or planned outages for hardware maintenance purposes do not
bring down the cluster. The Tru64 Cluster File System (CFS) provides a shared
root directory among all nodes on the cluster and hence ensures a single
global view of the filesystem regardless of which node a service runs on.
The GS1280 will support the high performance computational needs of the
Computer Graphics Laboratory, the RBVI, and the UCSF
Sequence Analysis and Consulting Service (SACS).
