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Pleiades Supercomputer

Pleiades, which ranks 7th on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, represents NASA's state-of-the-art technology for meeting the agency's supercomputing requirements, enabling NASA scientists and engineers to conduct modeling and simulation for NASA missions. This distributed-memory SGI ICE cluster is connected with InfiniBand in a dual-plane hypercube technology.

The system contains the following types of Intel® Xeon® processors: X5670 (Westmere), X5570 (Nehalem), and E5472 (Harpertown). Pleiades is named after the astronomical open star cluster of the same name.

System Architecture

• Manufacturer: SGI
• 185 racks (11,776 nodes)
• 1.34 Pflop/s peak cluster
• 1.09 Pflop/s LINPACK rating (June 2011, using 11,648 nodes)
• 2 racks (64 nodes total) enhanced with NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU): 43 teraflops total
• Total cores: 112,896 (32,768 additional GPU cores)
• Total memory: 191 TB
• Nodes
  • 4,608 Westmere nodes
    • 2 six-core processors per node
    • 4,480 nodes of Xeon X5670 and 128 nodes of Xeon X5675 (Westmere) processors
    • Processor speed: 2.93 GHz (X5670) or 3.06 GHz (X5675)
    • Cache: 12 MB Intel Smart Cache for 6 cores
    • Memory Type: DDR3 FB-DIMMs
    • 2 GB per core, 24 GB per node
    • InfiniBand® QDR host channel adapter
  • 1,280 Nehalem nodes
    • 2 quad-core processors per node
    • Xeon X5570 (Nehalem) processors
    • Processor speed: 2.93 GHz
    • Cache: 8 MB Intel Smart Cache for 4 cores
    • Memory Type: DDR3 FB-DIMMs
    • 3 GB per core, 24 GB per node
    • InfiniBand® DDR host channel adapter
  • 5,824 Harpertown nodes
    • 2 quad-core processors per node
    • Xeon E5472 (Harpertown) processors
    • Processor speed: 3 GHz
    • Cache: 6 MB per pair of cores
    • Memory Type: DDR2 FB-DIMMs
    • 1 GB per core, 8 GB per node (Except 64 nodes with 2GB per core)
    • InfiniBand® DDR host channel adapter
  • 64 GPU/Westmere nodes
    • 2 six-core Westmere processors per node
      • Xeon X5670 processors
      • Processor speed: 2.93 GHz
      • Cache: 12 MB Intel Smart Cache for 6 cores
      • Memory Type: DDR3 FB-DIMMs
      • 4 GB per core, 48 GB per node
      • InfiniBand® QDR host channel adapter
    • 1 NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU (512 CUDA cores) per node
      • Processor speed: 1.3 GHz
      • Memory size: 6 GB per node

Subsystems

• 14 front-end nodes
• 4 bridge nodes
• 2 PBS servers

Interconnects

• Internode: InfiniBand, with all nodes connected in a partial 11D hypercube topology
• Two independent InfiniBand fabrics
• InfiniBand DDR, QDR
• Gigabit Ethernet management network

Storage

• SGI® InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 home filesystem
• 12 DDN RAIDs, 9.3 PB total
• 6 Oracle Lustre cluster-wide filesystems

Operating Environment

• Operating system: SUSE® Linux®
• Job scheduler: PBS®
• Compilers: Intel and GNU C, C++ and Fortran
• MPI: SGI MPT, MVAPICH2, Intel MPI

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• Editor: Jill Dunbar
• Webmaster: John Hardman
• NASA Official: William Thigpen
• Last Updated: December 12, 2011