In the back of PADT’s product development lab is a closet. Yesterday afternoon PADT’s tireless IT team crammed themselves into the back of that closet and powered up our new cluster, bringing 1104 connected cores online. It sounded like a jet taking off when we submitted a test FLUENT solve across all the cores. Music to our ears.
We have recently become slammed with benchmarks for ANSYS and CUBE customers as well as our normal load of services work, so we decided it was time to pull the trigger and double the size of our cluster while adding a storage node. And of course, we needed it yesterday. So the IT team rolled up their sleeves, configured a design, ordered hardware, built it up, tested it all, and got it on line, in less than two weeks. This was while they did their normal IT work and dealt with a steady stream of CUBE sales inquiries. But it was a labor of love. We have all dreamed about breaking that thousand core barrier on one system, and this was our chance to make it happen.
If you need more horsepower and are looking for a solution that hits that sweet spot between cost and performance, visit our CUBE page at www.cube-hvpc.com and learn more about our workstations, servers, and clusters. Our team (after they get a little rest) will be more than happy to work with you to configure the right system for your real world needs.
Now that the sales plug is done, lets take a look at the stats on this bad boy:
| Name: | Columbia After the class of battlestars in Battlestar Galactica |
| Brand: | CUBE High Value Performance Compute Cluster, by PADT |
| Nodes: | 18 17 compute, 1 storage/control node, 4 CPU per Node |
| Cores: | 1104 AMD Opteron: 4 x 6308 3.5 GHz, 32 x 6278 2.4 GHz, 36 x 6380 2.5 GHz |
| Interconnect: | 18 port MELLANOX IB 4X QDR Infiniband switch |
| Memory: | 4.864 Terabytes |
| Solve Disk: | 43.5 TB RAID 0 |
| Storage Disk: | 64 TB RAID 50 |
Here are some pictures of the build and the final product:
A huge delivery from our supplier, Supermicro, started the process. This was the first pallet.
The build included installing the largest power strip any of us had ever seen.
Building a cluster consists of doing the same thing, over and over and over again.
We took over PADT’s clean room because it turns out you need a lot of space to build something this big.
It is fun to get the chance to build the machine you always wanted to build
2AM Selfie: Still going strong!
Almost there. After blowing a breaker, we needed to wait for some more
power to be routed to the closet.
Up and running!
Ratchet and Clank providing cooling air containment.
David, Sam, and Manny deserve a big shout-out for doing such a great job getting this thing up and running so fast!
When I logged on to my first computer, a TRS-80, in my high-school computer lab, I never, ever thought I would be running on a machine this powerful. And I would have told people they were crazy if they said a machine with this much throughput would cost less than $300,000. It is a good time to be a simulation user!
Now I just need to find a bigger closet for when we double the size again…
