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  A DOE Office of Science User Facility
  at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Carver: IBM iDataPlex

NERSC's next medium-sized scientific computing system will be an IBM iDataPlex Linux cluster. The system will be made available to NERSC users in early 2010.

The IBM system, selected in a competitive procurement, provides excellent performance, good energy efficiency per flop, and a familiar environment for mid-range parallel applications. It is intended to replace Bassi and Jacquard.

The system will be named after the American scientist George Washington Carver.

About George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was an American scientist, botanist, educator and inventor whose studies and teaching revolutionized agriculture in the Southern United States. Much of Carver's fame is related to the hundreds of plant products he popularized.

More about George Washington Carver on Wikipedia.

Carver Configuration

Complete information on the software configuration, including batch queue specifications, will be announced in the near future.

Compute Nodes
  • 400 nodes
  • 2 quad-core Intel Nehalem 2.67 GHz processors per node
  • 8 cores per node (3,200 total cores)
  • 24 GB DDR3 1333 MHz memory per node
  • System theoretical peak performance of 34.2 TFlops/sec
Login Nodes
  • 8 nodes
  • 2 quad-core Intel Nehalem 2.67 GHz processors per node
  • 8 cores per node (64 total cores)
  • 48 GB DDR3 1066 MHz memory per node
Network/Service Nodes
  • 2 nodes
  • 2 quad-core Intel Nehalem 2.67 GHz processors per node
  • 8 cores per node (16 total cores)
  • 48 GB DDR3 1066 MHz memory per node
High Performance Interconnect
  • 4X QDR InfiniBand, fibre optic cables
  • Local fat-trees with a global 2D mesh
I/O Subsystem
  • NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF) used for global homes, scratch, and project
  • NGF scratch will have 1.2 PB of disk space, and provide peak I/O bandwidth 25 GB/s
User Environment
  • Compilers
    • Portland Group Fortran, C, and C++
    • GNU Fortran, C, and C++
    • UPC
  • Programming Models
    • MPI
    • Threads
    • OpenMP
    • PGAS
  • Math Libraries
    • MKL (Intel's Math Kernel Library)
    • NAG
    • PETSc
  • Development and Performance Tools
    • Parallel Debugger TBD
    • PAPI Performance API
    • IPM (Integrated Performance Monitoring)
  • NERSC-Provided Applications
    • Science domain applications for chemistry, materials sciences
    • I/O libraries
    • Visualization and analysis tools
    • Grid and HPSS software
Usability Features
  • Fully featured Linux OS on every node.
  • Full compute node connectivity with the NERSC Global Filesystem.
  • Load-balancing login node selection.
Cooling
  • Liquid Cooled

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Page last modified: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:29:26 GMT
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