NCI National Facility

SGI Altix AC Hardware Details

One of the three rows of the Alphaserver SC system with the robotic tape mass data storage system in the background

APAC system

Specifications of the peak system:

126 nodes each containing:
- 4 x 1GHz ev68 (Alpha 21264C) cpus
- L1 cache (on chip): 64 kbytes (I) + 64 Kbytes (D)
- L2 cache (off chip): 8 Mbytes per cpu
- between 4 and 16GB of RAM (currently 36 8GB nodes and 4 16GB nodes)
- between 2 and 6 36GB SCSI disks
Aggregate Specfprate_base (of the compute nodes only) 4050
Peak theoretical performance of over 1Tflop and achieving ~820 Gflops on Linpack for over 80% performance achievable
Total of ~700GB of RAM
2.88 TB global user storage (additional to node disks)
576 GB system storage
Total of 13.1 TB of disk
Leading edge Quadrics "Elan3" interconnect:
- fat-tree topology with "direct memory access" and hardware broadcasts (single rail)
- MPI latency of < 5 usecs
- MPI bandwidth of 250 Mbytes/sec bidirectional

The GrangeNet broadband network is used to connect to institutions and centres that have signed up as grangenet partners. This allows fast access (gigabit) to the system for distributed projects, especially those involving visualisation or remote data repositories. The status of the GrangeNet connections is monitored via the GrangeNet weather station.

AlphaServer SC Systems

General Documentation on Alphaserver systems on HP's web site.