Compute Nodes

The White Rose Grid comprises five large compute nodes of which three are located at the University of Leeds, one at the University of Sheffield and one at the University of York. It offers a heterogeneous computing environment based on Sun Microsystems’ multiprocessor computers, and Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron based systems built by Streamline Computing. These nodes are interconnected by the network managed by YHMAN.  They provide significant heterogeneous computational facilities for WRG researchers and their collaborators.

The Leeds Grid Node 1 (named maxima) is a constellation of shared-memory systems based on Sun Fire 6800 and V880 systems configured with UltraSPARC III Cu 900MHz processors and large physical memory (32GB).

The Leeds Grid Node 2 comprises two Linux clusters (named snowdon & snowflake) based on 2.2 & 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processors interconnected with Myrinet 2000 networks, and in total delivering 292 CPUs. 

The Leeds Grid Node 3 (named everest) comprises Sun Microsystems’ Sun Fire V40z and V20z servers with dual-core AMD Opteron processors supplied by Esteem Systems and integrated by Streamline Computing. Seven of these (V40z) comprise four 2.2 GHz dual-core processors configured with 192 GB memory. Eighty seven V20z servers are interconnected with a Myrinet network; each of these comprises two 2.0 GHz dual-core processors sharing in total 0.7 TB of distributed memory across 348 processor cores. The system runs the Linux (64-bit SuSE) operating system.

The Leeds Nodes are  connected to 12 TB SAN storage and two EMC Centera disk-based archiving systems set up to provide 12TB of archive space to users. Sun HPC ClusterTools, Sun Forte Developer software and Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition are installed on all systems.

The 160 processor WRG Sheffield node (named iceberg) has been supplied by Sun Microsystems and integrated by Streamline Computing. Eighty of these 2.4GHz AMD Opteron processors are 4-way nodes with 16GB main memory coupled by a Myrinet network; the remaining eighty nodes are  2-way nodes with 4GB main memory.

At Sheffield there is also a Tier-2 GridPP node supporting the particle physics grid. This system is configured with 160 processors in 2-way nodes, and it runs 64-bit Scientific Linux, which is Redhat based.

The York Node includes two Beowulf type clusters, one named nevada (24 machine cluster; each providing two 2.4GHz dual core Opteron processors and 8 GB memory) in total offering 96 processor cores, 192 GB memory and 4.8 TB local scratch space; and the other named fimbrata which comprises 3 large memory nodes, each consisting of  four 2.4 GHz dual core processors (8 cores per machine) and 32GB memory, in total delivering 24 processor cores configured with 96GB memory and 200GB fast local scratch space. All nodes are connected into a 10GB/s infinipath network for fast file access. In addition the cluster nodes are able to use this network for very low latency <2µs MPI applications. 9TB of storage is provided for users on SATA drive arrays which are backed up daily and a 1 TB networked scratch space on f/c arrays. 

WRG systems support applications written in FORTRAN, C, and C++, implementing parallelism through  MPI or OpenMP.  A couple of the Sun Fire V880s serve the open source Grid Portal, which interoperates with Globus middleware and Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition.

This page is maintained by the White Rose Grid Coordinator.