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SGI Altix Technical Summary

Production Date: March 1, 2005

[cobalt.ncsa.uiuc.edu]
[login-co.ncsa.teragrid.org]

Machine Name Model Function Processor type # Procs L3 Cache
(per processor)
Memory Internal Interconnect
co-login SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 interactive use 1.6 GHz Itanium 2 32 9 MB 134 GB SGI NUMAlink
co-compute1 batch jobs 480 960 GB
co-compute2 512 3 TB
co-compute3 SGI Altix 4700 1.66 GHz dual core Itanium 2 128 (256 cores) 2x8 MB [*] 768 GB
co-viz3 - co-viz8
(6 systems)
SGI Prism 1.6 GHz Itanium 2 8 CPUs 9 MB 16 GB
[*] 8 MB shared by 2 cores

 

Common Attributes

COMPONENT DESCRIPTION
Hardware & Networking Architecture Distributed Shared Memory (ccNUMA)
Parallel Filesystem SGI CXFS
Scratch: 43 TB
Projects: 86 TB
Software Operating System SGI ProPack 6
Kernel: 2.6.16
(as of August 4 2009)
Compilers Intel 10.1: Fortran77/90/95 C C++
GNU: Fortran77 C C++
Programming Model OpenMP, Message Passing Interface (MPI)
Program Analysis Tools Totalview
Floating point format IEEE
Batch System Portable Batch System (PBS Pro) with
MOAB Scheduler
Policies/User Limits Home directory disk quota 50 GBytes
Interactive scratch quota None currently
Maximum disk per job No limits currently
Charging Algorithm (as of August 6 2008)
 # SUs =  ServiceLevel * Time

where

ServiceLevel = 1.0  for Normal Interactive
                        Normal Batch
                        Normal Dedicated Batch
             = 1.25 for Industrial Batch
                        Industrial Dedicated Batch

Timeshared jobs:
 Time = # CPUs allocated  * Total Wall Clock 
            to the job           Hours

Dedicated jobs:
 Time = # CPUs on the host * Total Wall Clock 
                                  Hours 
  

Recommended Use Guidelines

The NCSA SGI Altix System (cobalt) is primarily intended to run applications with moderate to high levels of parallelism (32-512 processors). Applications running with a relatively small number of processors (ie. less than 16 CPUs), MPI codes that perform well in a distributed cluster environment, and condor-type computations are better suited to other HPC resources available at NCSA.

In particular, the cobalt is intended for:

  • applications requiring large shared-memory (over 250GB)
  • large scale simulations and hero runs
  • high-end vizualization (via access to the Prism systems)
  • codes with high inter-processor communications or inherent load balancing challenges which perform better in an SMP environment
  • large-scale interactive data analysis
  • on-demand computing