October 29, 2019 - by CSCS
In 2014, CSCS entered into service a system purchased from Hewlett Packard Enterprise named Monte Leone. The system was named after the highest mountain of the Lepontine Alps located on the border between Switzerland and Italy.
Monte Leone was a unique design as it was the first general purpose diskless cluster to be put into production operations at CSCS. The system also provided the capability of computing on large memory nodes as a portion of the cluster was configured with 768GB of RAM. The cluster was designed to handle large memory computing needs for the User Lab as well as meet the production computing requirements for a commercial customer, Hilti. Hilti’s computing requirements included both GPU enabled nodes and multi-core nodes configured to meet the demanding customer requirements. Their requirements included the need for pure computational work as well as remote visualization.
In 2019, after 5 years of successful computing, Monte Leone was retired as a production cluster. The nodes have found a new life as computing resources in the CSCS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the POLLUX facility.