HP Itanium Cluster - Snowstorm

Roy with Snowstorm, the Teraflop cluster

In November 2004 the Itanium2-cluster "Snowstorm" was upgraded from 66 Gigaflop to 1,1 Teraflop. The deal was locally funded with support from "Young Outstanding Investigator" groups at Institute of Chemistry.

In August 2005 the cluster was further expanded with 50 new nodes which more than doubled the capacity and making the peak performance pass 2TF. All nodes where also connected through an infiniband network which further boosted the speed for parallel applications.

Snowstorm was delivered by HP and Intel, and was made available to HPC-users at UiTø in less than 4 hours on the day of installation. Snowstorm is also available to national users that received quota in September 2004. The system is also utilized by researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute.

The Installation of Snowstorm