Hardware
Lucidor is a distributed memory computer (a cluster) from HP. It consists of 74 HP rx2600 servers and 16 HP zx6000 workstations, each with two 900 MHz Itanium 2 "McKinley" processors and 6 GB of main memory. The rx2600 and zx6000 nodes differ only in the configuration of the memory banks (although they both have the same total amount of main memory) and in that the zx6000 has a PCI-X slot replaced with an AGP slot with a graphics card.
The interconnect is myrinet. All nodes have a Myricom M3F-PCIXD-2 card (64-bit wide 133 MHz PCI-X.) All cards are connected to a Myrinet-2000 M3-E128 switch populated with 96 ports. Each card/port has a data rate of 2+2 Gbit/s, all through 50/125 multi-mode fiber.
Machine configuration
| Number of nodes |
MHz | CPU type |
Peak GFlop/s |
RAM (GB) |
Disk (GB) |
Scratch (GB) |
Nick- name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90 | 900.0 | McKinley | 7.2 | 6 | 30 | 21 | B |
| Total | |||||||
| 90 | 648 | 540 | 1890 | ||||
In addition to local disk there is plenty of space in the distributed file systems for user home catalogues, source codes, application codes et cetera, as well as a mass storage system for long-term storage of large data sets.
Some performance and cache size numbers
| Node type (nickname) | B | unit |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | McKinley | |
| Processors per node | 2 | |
| Memory Bandwidth | 6.4 | GByte/sec |
| Local Disk I/O Bandwidth | 58 | MByte/sec (measured writes) |
| Network Adapter Peak Bandwidth (unidirectional) | 248 | MByte/sec |
| Network Adapter Peak Bandwidth (bidirectional) | 489 | MByte/sec |
| Network Latency | 6.3 | microseconds (measured) |
| L1 Inst Cache | 16 | Kilobytes |
| L1 Data Cache | 16 | Kilobytes (bypassed for floating point) |
| L1 Data Cache Line | 64 | Bytes |
| L1 Data Cache Associativity | 4 | Ways |
| L2 Cache | 256 | Kilobytes |
| L2 Cache Line | 128 | Bytes |
| L2 Cache Associativity | 8 | Ways |
| L3 Cache | 1.5 | Megabytes |
| L3 Cache Line | 128 | Bytes |
| L3 Cache Associativity | 6 | Ways |
Software
The operating system for these nodes is Debian Linux and FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) was used when installing the nodes. Programming languages supported are C, C++, FORTRAN77 and Fortran90. For more information about available software see the software section.
