System X is a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech faculty
members, staff, and students in the summer of 2003, comprising 1,100
Apple PowerMac G5 computers. System X is currently running at 12.25
Teraflops, (20.24 peak), and was last ranked #47 (November, 2006) in the
TOP500
list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. At that time,
it was still the most powerful system categorized by TOP500 as "self
made" at any university. It is now part of Virginia Tech's
suite of high performance computers being used for research.
Compute Nodes:
1100
Apple Xserve G5 cluster nodes with the following specifications:
- Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
- 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
- 80 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
- One Mellanox Cougar InfiniBand 4x HCA*
* HCA added from third party and not a build-to-order option
Compile Nodes:
3
Apple Xserve G5 nodes
with the following specifications:
- Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors
- 4 GB ECC DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
- 3x250 GB S-ATA hard disk drive
Storage:
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A SAN with 6 Apple Xserve RAID units and one Sun X4200 NFS server. Total available user stoarage: 16T
Mobybits is an SGI InfinfiniteStorage 4500 with 16 1600mhz Itanium
CPUs, 64 GBytes of system-RAM, 16 GBytes of controller-cache, 12 gbits of
Ethernet bandwidth, 20 gbits of full-duplex Infiniband bandwidth, and
50 TBytes of usable disk space.
Network:
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Primary:
4 SilverStorm Technologies 9120 InfiniBand core switches
- 4X InfiniBand, 10 Gbps bidirectional port speed
- each switch populated with 11 leaf modules and 3 spine modules
- total 132 InfiniBand ports per core switch
64 SilverStorm
Technologies 9024 InfiniBand leaf switches
- 4X InfiniBand, 10 Gbps bidirectional port speed
- total 24 InfiniBand ports per leaf switch
InfiniBand fabric management by SilverStorm
Technologies (formerly InfiniCon Systems)
Secondary:
6 Cisco Systems 240-port 4506 Gigabit Ethernet switches
Software [return to top]
Operating System:
Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9
Message Passing:
MVAPICH
Compilers:
IBM XL Fortran for Mac OS X
IBM XLC for Mac OS X
gcc 3.3 for Mac OS X
Queue and Scheduler:
Torque (OpenPBS)
Moab (Maui)
