Description of Buin
The CSCS XT4 system (buin) consists of 3 cabinets, containing 12 service processing elements (PEs), subdivided into 6 service blades, and 264 quadcore nodes giving 1056 compute PEs, subdivided into 66 compute blades.
The XT4 system runs the Cray Linux operating system, a stripped down version of Linux with a minimal kernel.
Compute PEs are based on an AMD Opteron CPU running at a frequency of 2.4 GHz (4.8 GigaFlops of peak performance), compute nodes may access 8 GB of RAM.
Each Opteron processor is directly connected to a dedicated Cray SeaStar chip (based on the IBM Power architecture), providing a reliable interconnect; each SeaStar contains a 6-Port router and communications engine and also provides a serial connection to the Cray RAS and Management system.
The CSCS system is configured as a so-called Class 2 Topology, a full 3D Torus of size 9x4x8.
The service PEs specialize by function, each one may be configured as a Login PE, an I/O PE, a System PE or a Network PE. They run a customized version of Linux as their operating system.
Compute PEs run a stripped down version of Linux with a minimal kernel.
Users may only have interactive access to Login PEs, other system PEs are reserved for system purposes, and compute PEs may only be accessed via the PBS batch/queueing system ("batch" compute PEs) or directly via the aprun command (so-called "interactive" compute PEs).
The I/O subsystem consists of a 4.7 TB System Raid, and an additional 28 TB aimed at supporting a Lustre parallel filesystem. 4 I/O PEs are dedicated to this filesystem.
Description of Dôle
The CSCS XT4 system (dole) consists of 2 cabinets, containing 8 service processing elements (PEs), subdivided into 4 service blades, and 160 quadcore nodes giving 640 compute PEs, subdivided into 40 compute blades.
The XT4 system runs the Cray Linux operating system, a stripped down version of Linux with a minimal kernel.
Compute PEs are based on an AMD Opteron CPU running at a frequency of 2.4 GHz (4.8 GigaFlops of peak performance), compute nodes may access 8 GB of RAM.
Each Opteron processor is directly connected to a dedicated Cray SeaStar chip (based on the IBM Power architecture), providing a reliable interconnect; each SeaStar contains a 6-Port router and communications engine and also provides a serial connection to the Cray RAS and Management system.
The CSCS system is configured as a so-called Class 2 Topology, a full 3D Torus of size 6x4x8.
The service PEs specialize by function, each one may be configured as a Login PE, an I/O PE, a System PE or a Network PE. They run a customized version of Linux as their operating system.
Compute PEs run a stripped down version of Linux with a minimal kernel.
Users may only have interactive access to Login PEs, other system PEs are reserved for system purposes, and compute PEs may only be accessed via the PBS batch/queueing system ("batch" compute PEs) or directly via the aprun command (so-called "interactive" compute PEs).
Lustre is served by external servers and is available on compute nodes through dedicated lustre routers.