Altix 3700 Supercomputer (Redwood)

Redwood is a capability resource for researchers who have particularly high performance codes and calculations that cannot be run (or cannot be run efficiently) on other MCSR supercomputers or clusters. Priority on redwood is given to researchers who can demonstrate the need for this resource and their ability to efficiently use it. Redwood Configuration Redwood is an SGI Model 3700 Altix high performance compute server with 64 Itanium2 900 MHz processors, and 160 Itanium2 1.3 GHz processors with 1 GB memory each. Thus the machine currently operates with 224 processors, 224 GBytes memory, and 8.1 Tbytes of fiber channel disk. The word size is 64 bits. Redwood is currently running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) with SGI ProPack 4. The current O/S kernel version (2.6.5-7.244-sn2) may be found by typing uname -r from a redwood command prompt. SGI Linux Compilers, Development Tools, and Applications Compilers: Intel compilers for Linux (C/C++, Fortran) versions 7.1, 8.0, 8.1 and 9.0, GNU Compiler Collection (C, Fortran 77) versions 3.2.x Libraries: SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPT), Scientific Computing Software Library (SCSL), Flexible File Input/Output (FFIO), CPU sets and memory placement, Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) Code development tools and debuggers: GNU GDB, Intel Debugger (IDB) Available applications also include NWChem 4.5/4.6, Gaussian 03 (D.01), Abaqus, PBSPro, Amber 7/8/9, MPQC, Gromacs, and all basic GNU applications and features. General Altix Architecture The SGI Altix 3700 supercluster offers global shared memory across multiple nodes, scaling to hundreds of Intel Itanium 2 microprocessors. Each node in an SGI Altix 3700 supercluster can combine up to 256 processors in a single Linux operating system image. With its unique global shared-memory capabilities and lightning-fast SGI® NUMAlink interconnect fabric, the SGI Altix 3700 supercluster is ideal for managing complex data sets and complete workflows, enabling the highest levels of innovation for technical users. For more information on Altix Superclusters, you may either visit SGI Altix and/or watch Altix video or take a flash tour provided by SGI. Parallel Processing and Global Shared Memory There are two methods for taking advantage of multiple processors on the Altix 3700. The first, multiprocessing, happens by default. That is, as many programs as there are processors can be executing in parallel since Altix design involves the SGI NUMAflex architecture as SGI Origin products. The second method, multitasking, occurs when two or more processors work together to run a single program. It is possible to multitask FORTRAN, C and C++ programs on the Altix 3000 Series supercomputer. To achieve multitasking, the programmer can insert explicit compiler directives into the source code. Please visit SGI's Technical Publications for documentation on parallel programming.