Speaker
Robert Sinkovits
(SDSC)
Description
The Gordon system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center was designed from the ground up to solve data and memory intensive problems. For example, in contrast to the current trend in supercomputing of building increasingly larger machines with less memory per core, Gordon’s 1024 compute nodes each contain two Intel Sandy Bridge octo-core processors and 64 GB of memory. The nodes are connected via a dual-rail 3D torus network based on Mellanox QDR Infiniband hardware and can access a 4 PB Lustre-based parallel file system capable of delivering up to 100 GB/s of sequential bandwidth. Two novel features of Gordon though make it particularly well suited for data intensive problems. To bridge the large latency gap between remote memory and spinning disk, Gordon contains 300 TB of high performance Intel 710 series solid-state storage. Gordon also deploys a number of “supernodes”, based on ScaleMP’s vSMP foundation software, which can provide users with up to 2 TB of virtual shared memory. This talk will cover the Gordon architecture and our motivation for building the system. We will then present the results of both micro andapplication level benchmarks. The talk concludes with recent Gordon successstories spanning domains, such as computational chemistry and structural mechanics, that have traditionally made use of HPC resources and fields that are relatively new to supercomputing.
Primary author
Robert Sinkovits
(SDSC)
