Bert and Ernie - An Overview

What is HPC?

Scientific computing generally revolves around researchers performing complex calculations as fast as possible. The super computers of the 70s, 80s and 90s were custom built to provide researchers with access to a machine with more memory (RAM) and CPU cores than the small, slow and expensive desktop computers of the era. These large machines such as those build by Cray and SGI were expensive and took a huge amount of space, power and cooling.

In the early 2000s, the first multi core processors were released which dramatically changed the ability for users to being to take advantage of parallelisation when performing calculations. Today, the term High Performance Computing (HPC) is user to describe a form of supercomputing based upon off the shelf hardware. HPC clusters are often built from the same hardware as that which is found in high-end desktop workstations or web servers.

Bert and Ernie is the new IBERS HPC solution.

We have 408 CPU cores, 2.4TB RAM and 43TB storage capacity and 11TB of fast access disk. The cluster was built by ClusterVision.

Specs Per node;

node001 (large.q) - 32 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6220 512GB RAM

node002 (intel.q) - 8 Cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5647 @ 2.93GHz 192GB RAM

node003 (intel.q) - 8 Cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5647 @ 2.93GHz 192GB RAM

node004 (intel.q) - 8 Cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5647 @ 2.93GHz 192GB RAM

node005 (amd.q) - 32 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6220 98GB RAM

node006 (amd.q) - 32 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6220 98GB RAM

node007 (amd.q) - 32 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6220 98GB RAM

node008 (amd.q) - 64 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6376 256GB RAM

node009 (amd.q) - 64 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6376 256GB RAM

node010 (amd.q) - 64 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6376 256GB RAM

node011 (amd.q) - 64 Cores 4 x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6376 256GB RAM