University of Vienna
Faculty of Computer Science
Research Group Scientific Computing
Währinger Straße 29
1090 Vienna, AUSTRIA
webmaster
Hardware Infrastructure
| This is a short overview of some of the interesting architectures and machines that are available at the Research Group Scientific Computing, used both for education and research purposes. |
 |
The CORA GPU cluster comprises 8 computational nodes and one front-end with two Intel Xeon quad-core X5550 2.66Ghz CPUs and 24GB DDR3-1333 system memory. Each of the computational nodes is additionally equipped with two nVidia Tesla C2050 and one nVidia Tesla C1060 GPUs. A single Tesla C2050 (Fermi architecture) comprises 448 Streaming-cores, 3GB GDDR5 device memory and a peak floating-point performance of 1.03 TFlop/s (single precision). A Tesla C1060 provides 240 Streaming- cores, 4GB GDDR3 device memory and a single-precision peak performance of 933 Gflop/s. The interconnection capabilities of CORA include Gigabit Ethernet and high performance QDR Infiniband. In total, the CORA GPU cluster comprises 72 CPU-cores, 9088 GPU-cores and an aggregated main memory of 216GB. The system offers an available disk space of approx. 64TB. CORA has been put into service in February 2010, and was upgraded with Fermi GPUs in November 2010. Find more information at http://cora.gridlab.univie.ac.at/. |
 |
The NOVA mini-cluster comprises 4 computational nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron™ 6172 2.1GHz processors. Available system-memory is 48GB 1333MHz DDR3 per node. Networking interconnects include QDR Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet. In total, the system offers 96 CPU-cores with 192 GB DDR3 memory and 8 TB HDD storage. The system runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (64 bit), and has been put into service in March 2011. |
 |
MERET is an Intel® "Nehalem-EX" based system and comprises four Intel® Xeon® X7560 8-core processors (2.26 GHz, 24 MB L3) and 64GB of RAM. Each core provides 2-way SMT, bringing the total number of hardware threads supported by MERET to 64. The system runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64 bit). MERET was put into service in October 2010. |
 |
CELLINE comprises four IBM BladeCenter QS22 and one IBM BladeCenter LS22 that are mounted in an IBM BladeCenter H Chassis. Interconnection capabilities of CELLINE include Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand.
Each QS22 comprises two processors of the type IBM PowerXCell 8i (3.2GHz/ 1MB L2). The IBM PowerXCell 8i processor is based on Cell/B.E. architecture, but it provides five times the double precision performance of the Cell/B.E. processor. Each QS22 comprises 32GB DDR2 memory. The LS22 comprises two processors of the type Quad Core AMD Opteron 2356 (2.3GHz/ 2MB L2) and 32GB DDR2 memory. In total CELLINE comprises 160GB DDR2 memory and provides about 1TeraFlop/s of Double-Precision performance. CELLINE has been put into service in December 2008. |
 |
The cluster LUNA consists of 72 Sun Fire X4100 servers with two Dual-Core AMD Opteron 275 processors and 8 GB of memory. That's a total of 288 cores and 576 GB of RAM. The 72 nodes are connected to each other both by a Ethernet network and a high-speed Infiniband connection.
Power consumption of the complete cluster is about 45 kW, and each of the three racks weighs about 800kg. The cluster runs the Solaris 10 x86 operating system and Sun Grid Engine for job administration. It has been put into service in November 2006. Further information can be found at http://luna.gridlab.univie.ac.at/. |
 |
The cluster AURORA consists of 72 IBM x335 nodes, each
with two Pentium IV Nocona 3.6 GHz processors and 4 GB of memory.
In total it comprises 144 processors and 288 GB of RAM.
The 72 nodes are interconnected by an Ethernet network and a high-speed
Infiniband connection.
The Red Hat Linux is used as operating system.
This cluster has been purchased in the context of the AURORA project (1997-2007). The AURORA project, which has been led by our Research Group, was an interdisciplinary project that involved several institutes from the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology. The cluster is administered by the staff of our Research Group, but it is located at the Vienna University of Technology. It has been put into service in April 2005. Further information can be found at http://aurora.tuwien.ac.at/. |
 |
A mini-cluster of four Sony Playstation 3 consoles is used both as an affordable means for students to learn programming on the IBM Cell Broadband Endgine (as used in Roadrunner, the world's first petaflop/s system), but also contributes to the Folding@home project, which is a distributed computing project studying protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. |
 |
NADIA comprises two Intel Xeon X5550 Quad-Core processors with 24GB DDR3-1333 memory. Additionally NADIA is equiped with an NVIDIA CUDA enabled GeForce GTX 480, GTX 285 and an ATI Radeon 5870 GPU. The Nvida GTX 480 GPU provides: 480 processor cores, 1536 MB GDDR5 device memory with bandwith of 177GB/s, 364-bit memory bus, 700MHz core frequency and 1400MHz unified processor frequency. The Nvida GTX 285 GPU provides: 240 processor cores, 1GB GDDR3 device memory with bandwith of 159GB/s, 512-bit memory bus with 8 independent controllers, 648MHz core frequency and 1476MHz unified processor frequency. The ATI Radeon HD5870 provides: 1600 stream processing units, GDDR5 interface with 153.6 GB/sec memory bandwidth and a single-precision peak performance of 2.72 TeraFLOPS. The system runs x86_64 Linux (RHEL). |
 |
This SPARC T3-2 Server
is powered by the SPARC T3 processor
in a two-socket system with 3 rack units.
With 2 x 1.65 GHz 16-core processors (each capable of 8 simultaneous
threads) it delivers up to 256 parallel threads. Memory size is 128 GB.
It has been put into service in May 2011. |
 |
The Sun Fire V40z
server provides high versatility in a small footprint (3 rack units).
Our machine features 4 AMD Opteron 875 Dual-Core processors with 2.2 GHz
and 1 MB Level 2 cache per core. The CPUs are connected to each other by
a 1 GHz HyperTransport link.
Memory size is 24 GB, and disk storage is provided by 5 Ultra320 SCSI disks with 300 GB each, for a total of 1.5 TB. The system runs Solaris 10 x86. |
 |
The Sun Fire X4600 M2
server is a compact (4 rack units), energy-efficient system. Our machine
houses 8 AMD Opteron 8218 Dual-Core processors with 2.6 GHz, for a total
of 16 cores, each with 1 MB Level 2 cache. CPUs are connected to each other
by a HyperTransport link running at 8 GB/seconds.
It includes 32GB of main memory and two SAS (serial attached SCSI) harddisks. Electrical power is provided by four hot-swappable power supplies, redundant in 2+2 configuration, with 850W each. Operating System is Solaris 10 x86. |
 |
The Sun Fire X4500 combines a powerful four-core x64 server with up to 24 TB of storage in a compact format (4 rack units). It features 2 AMD Opteron 285 Dual-Core processors with 2.6 GHz and 16 GB of main memory. The 48 3.5-inch SATA II disks with 500 GB each make up for a total of 24 TB of raw disk space. Power consumption is 1800W, provided by dual redundant power supplies. The machine runs Solaris 10 x86 and makes use of Software RAID implemented by the Solaris ZFS file system. |
