Description of the System

The Sun Fire system at CSCS (rigi) is a tightly coupled computing cluster system, running Rocks cluster release 4.3 (Mars Hill), consisting of 26 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes , each one offering 2 AMD Dual core Opteron Processor Model 2218 running at 2.6 GHz, interconnected via an high performance Double Data Rate (DDR) 4 x Infiniband network together with a standard Gigabit Ethernet LAN.

There are two Sun Fire X4200 login nodes acting as interactive front-end servers, that is as main entry points for the whole cluster, rigi.cscs.ch, and also as PBS Pro Batch Queuing System Server. Both front-end servers are equipped with 2 x Dual Core AMD Opteron (tm) Processor 280 clocked at 2.4 Ghz, and 12 GB of main physical memory.

A Network Attached Server Appliance, based on a Sun Fire X4500 Thumper Solution, is providing a temporary disk storage space under the /scratch NFS shared file system, for a total of about 18 TB of volatile disk storage space. A separate NFS file server is also providing file application services (/apps) to the cluster nodes.

All the computing nodes "rigi[110-135] or compute-0-[0-25]" have 8,16,32 or 48 Gb of main memory installed and a /local temporary-volatile file system of about 200 GB each, for an aggregate distributed local capacity of about 5.2 TB.

Users home directory (/users/home) 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. In addition, the CSCS global shared parallel file system /project (/nfs/project/project) is also available within the entire cluster and has a default GROUP quota set to 10 TB. The CSCS Archive system is read-write accessible via the frontend RIGI servers under /archive (/nfs/archive/users).

Users may log on interactively to the front-ends via the ssh protocol through the alias rigi.cscs.ch, securely connecting to the pool of login nodes currently available.