Fornax

Fornax is Latin for “furnace” and is the name of a southern hemisphere constellation identified by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. This name is representative of the supercomputer’s capability for dealing with data-intensive problems, which is expected to be of particular use to the radio astronomy computing community.

The SGI supercomputer comprises 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an Nvidia Tesla C2075 GPU and 72 GB RAM, resulting in a system containing 1152 cores and 96 GPUs.

These GPUs have some similarities with Nvidia gaming graphics cards but are optimised for double precision scientific computing. The GPUs provide the majority of the compute power of Fornax, and are better suited to repeated operations on streamed data than CPUs.

The system also has a 500 TB global filesystem, in addition to each node having 7 TB of local disk space. One distinguishing feature of the system, allowing it to tackle data-intensive problems, is the presence of two InfiniBand networks. The first allows each node to access the global filesystem, while the second allows access to neighbouring nodes. This dual-rail system also allows separation of MPI traffic from storage traffic.

Manufacturer: SGI (USA)
Compute Processors: Intel Xeon X5650 ‘Westmere’ (6-core, 2.66 GHz)
GPU Processors: Nvidia Tesla C2075
Memory: 7 TB RAM (96 nodes with 72GB RAM per node)