This week ClusterVision announced that the company and its partners have completed the deployment of a new HPC system at the University of Nottingham. The 45 Teraflop “Minerva” supercomputer will be used to drive academic research in a wide range of scientific disciplines.
As the prime contractor for the design, build and management of the Minerva system, ClusterVision managed a complex collaboration of 17 hardware and software partners. Key contributors to the Minerva project included Dell, Intel, Qlogic, Nvidia, Panasas, Bright Computing, Altair Engineering and Allinea.
The Minerva system comprises 2 redundant master nodes; Dell PowerEdge R720’s, with a single master node shared storage provided by the 2U 12 disk Dell PowerVault MD3200. The compute capacity is shared between 156 Dell PowerEdge nodes, arranged in Dell C6220 servers, with 12 high memory fast I/O nodes also in Dell 6220’s, and 6 additional GPU accelerated nodes. Originally designed using C6100 servers, the Dell compute node specification was subsequently upgraded to Dell PowerEdge C6620’s which were introduced as a vehicle for the latest Intel Xeon E5 Sandy Bridge processors. Each 2.6 Ghz compute unit contains a 500 GB local disk. The fast I/O nodes have 500 GB SATA and 4 100 GB SSD’s and are designed specifically for the high intensity needs of the applications. The 6 GPU accelerated nodes comprise a Supermicro base chassis, also incorporating the 8-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, together with 2 Tesla M2090 series GPU’s from NVIDIA.
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