Description of the System

The HP-XC SVA system at CSCS consists of 16 visualization/compute nodes, each one featuring 2 AMD Opteron Processor 250 running at 2.4 GHz, interconnected via 2 dedicated SDR Infiniband 4x LAN Fabrics.

The first ten nodes "horus[1-10]" have 8 Gb of main memory installed, while five nodes "horus[11-14, 16]" have 16 Gbytes RAM, and one node "horus15" has 32 Gb available. Each visualization node offers 2 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics card, giving to the end user a 1:1 factor of CPU/GPU.

The main login HORUS cluster node, acting as an interactive front-end file server, is called horus.cscs.ch and can be accessed via SSH connection, once logged in first to the central interactive CSCS server BAR (bar.cscs.ch).

A standard 1-Gibabit Ethernet LAN provides direct cluster node interconnection to the outside world (horus-rgs01.login.cscs.ch - horus-rgs10.login.cscs.ch), in order to provide HP RGS (Remote Graphics Software) services for enabling true remote visualization activities or via the open source software solution provided by VirtualGL/TurboVNC/TurboJPEG. The whole cluster is also interconnected via a common 1-Gigabit Ethernet for the administration network traffic.

A global parallel shared GPFS file system /project is currently available within the whole cluster providing a total raw capacity of approximately 219 TB of on-line disk storage space. A default of 10 TB of group quota is enabled on the /project GPFS file system. Users home directory (/users) are GPFS shared among the whole cluster members and are centrally provided by a global GPFS file server. They are kept under regular backup and subject to USER disk quota set to 10 GB.

The cluster runs the HP XC System Software, on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 5) distribution of the operating system.