Description

First supercomputer in France based on the Itanium-2 processor, this new HP cluster is running Linux.

The cluster architecture is made of 104 nodes interconnected by a Myrinet network. Each node features 2 Itanium-2 processors 64 bits at 900 MHz, 3 Gigabytes of memory and 72 gigabytes of local disk.

The overall cluster nodes provide 208 processors, 312 Gigabytes of memory and a disk capacity of 7.5 Terabytes. This configuration is completed with a server with 12 GB of memory, an administration network (FastEthernet switches connected to a 24 ports Gigabit switch), and 4 SCSI disk arrays of 1.1 TeraByte each.

Performances

i-cluster2 performances are 561 GigaFlops on the Linpack benchmark.
It was ranked 283rd on TOP 500 in November 2003.

Users

i-cluster2 is located in Montbonnot, France in the INRIA Rhône-Alpes facility. Research projects participating to this action are:

• Sardes, common project with LSR-IMAG laboratory (CNRS, INPG, UJF)
• Apache, common project with ID-IMAG laboratory(CNRS,INPG, UJF)
• Graal, common project with LIP laboratory (CNRS, ENSL, UCB)
• Reso, common project with LIP laboratory (CNRS, ENSL, UCB)

This total computing power of more than a half teraflop, is accessible to the external institutional or industrial users within the framework of partnerships. There are many experiments concerning parallel algorithms and optimisation for applications from various domains: molecular biology, chemistry, geophysics, astrophysics, mathematics, electromagnetics, robotics, virtual reality, etc.

The i-cluster2 is fully exploited, during February 2005, for example, there were about 20000 jobs submitted. The i-cluster2 will continue to be a valuable computation resource and its importance will increase as it will become a part of the GRID5000 machine: a supercalculator of 5000 processors spread all over France and offered to a much larger research community.

Fundings

This operation was carried out within the framework of a State-Region collaboration plan with the following partners: INRIA, MENRT (via INPG and UJF), ENSL and région Rhône-Alpes.

Others partners

We are very grateful to RedHat and Myricom for supporting us and thank them for their generosity.