THE COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES AT PARALLAB

The Bergen Center for Computational Science (BCCS) operates supercomputer facilities that serve the high-end computational needs of scientists at Norwegian universities and other national research and industrial organizations. Additionally, the system is used for research and development by international organizations and provides services to European research groups (and projects) as well as to cooperating scientists from international institutions.

The installations are funded by the Norwegian Research Council through the NOTUR project, the University of Bergen (UiB), the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC), the Institute for Marine Research (IMR), and Universitetsforskning Bergen (UNIFOB). These partners make critical use of the system for scientific research and development, in particular targeting marine activities ranging from marine molecular biology to the large scale simulation of ocean processes including the management of ocean resources and monitoring of the environment. Heavy use by academic research groups has traditionally come from computational chemistry, computational physics, computational biology, the geosciences, and applied mathematics.

The supercomputer facilities are installed at the High Technology Center in Bergen (HiB) and are managed and operated by staff of Parallab. The installation consists of the following parts:

1. IBM p690 Regatta Turbo system (tre.bccs.uib.no)

• 3 eSeries p690 Regatta SMP nodes
• 96 Power4 1.3 Ghz processors (32 cpus per node)
• 320 Gigabyte memory (64 + 64 + 192 Gigabyte)
• UNIX operating system (AIX 5.1)

The disk subsystem is based on the IBM 7133 Model D40 with SSA technology and has a total disk capacity of more than 7 Terabyte (142 x 36.4 + 16 x 146 Gigabyte). Each Regatta node has also 3 internal 36.4 Gigabyte disks (reserved for use by the operating system).

The Regatta system came alive early January 2002 and was available to the partners shortly afterwards. The system has one of the fastest (single) CPU's of the supercomputers in Norway.

2. IBM 1300 cluster (fire.bccs.uib.no)

• 32 x330 nodes
• 64 Pentium III 1.26 Ghz processors (2 cpus per node)
• 64 Gigabyte memory (2 Gigabyte per node)
• 576 Gigabyte disk (18 Gigabyte per node)
• Linux operating system (Redhat)
• Fast Ethernet node interconnect

The cluster has an x340 front-end with two Pentium III 1 Ghz processors, 2 Gigabyte RAM and 54.6 Gigabyte disk. The IBM 1300 cluster came alive mid April 2002. It is an experimental platform and primarily targets Life Science applications.

3. IBM e1350 cluster (fimm.bccs.uib.no)

• 86 e326 nodes
• 172 AMD/opteron 250 (2.4 Ghz) processors (2 cpus per node)
• 258 Gigabyte memory (on average 3 Gigabyte per node)
• 6880 Gigabyte disk (80 Gigabyte per node)
• Linux operating system (Redhat)
• Gigabit Ethernet on all 86 nodes, and a low latency SCI/Dolphin interconnect on 25 nodes

The cluster also has three x346 storage nodes that are dedicated to provide high bandwidth between the e326 compute nodes and 8 Terabyte external storage. The IBM e1350 cluster came alive November 2004. It serves a variety of applications, including bio-informatics, physics, geophysics, and chemistry. See also here.

4. IBM Tape Library

The secondary storage device for backup and archiving is based on the IBM 3584 UltraScalable Tape Library. It has ca. 70 to 560 Terabyte tape capacity (700 cartridges) in the current configuration, amount depends on mix of LTO1, LTO2 and LTO3 tapes and amount of compression. The device came originally with four LTO1 tape-drives (which store 100-200 Gbyte data on one tape). Two LTO2 tape-drives have later been added that can store 200-400 Gigabyte data on a tape. In 2006, two of the LTO1 drives where replaced with LTO3 drives that can store 400-800GB per tape.

A page that lists all HPC equipment that was once operated by Parallab can be found here.