Hardware

The cluster consists of 24 general purpose compute nodes, 2 special high core count and RAM compute nodes, 2 head nodes, and supporting hardware.

The specifications for the general compute nodes are:

• 
• Dell M420 blade server
• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2470v2 10 core @ 2.40Ghz
• 96 GB Main memory @ 1600MT/s
• 80GB SSD system drive
• 10 Gbit Ethernet interconnect

The specifications for the special compute nodes are:

• 
• Dell M915 blade server
• 4x AMD Opteron 6272 16 core at 2.1Ghz
• 512 GB Main memory @ 1600MT/s
• 10 Gbit Ethernet interconnect

The specifications for the head nodes are:

• 
• Dell R420 1U Server
• 1x Intel Xeon E5-2407v2 4 core @ 2.4Ghz
• 16 GB Main memory @ 1600MT/s

Other dedicated supporting hardware:

• 
• Dell M1000e Blade enclosure
• APC Netshelter rack
• 2x Dell Powerconnect 5524 network switches
• Dell KVM switch with 1U console

Balancing

The cluster uses ipvs to balance incoming users to different nodes. Nagios, with custom scripts, is used to monitor and weigh the nodes.