Welcome to the HPC User Wiki of the University of Oldenburg

Note: This is a first, preliminary version (v0.01) of the HPC User Wiki. Its primary purpose is to get you started with our new clusters (FLOW and HERO), enabling you to familiarize with these systems and gather some experience. More elaborate, updated versions will follow, so you may want to check these pages regularly.

Introduction

The central HPC facilities of the University of Oldenburg comprise three systems:

• FLOW (Facility for Large-Scale COmputations in Wind Energy Research): IBM iDataPlex cluster solution with 2232 CPU cores, 6 TB of (distributed) main memory, and Quad-Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand interconnect (theoretical peak performance: 24 TFlop/s).

• HERO (High-End Computing Resource Oldenburg): hybrid system composed of two components:
  • IBM iDataPlex cluster solution with 1800 CPU cores (Westmere-EP, 2.66 GHz), 4 TB of (distributed) main memory, and Gigabit interconnect (theoretical peak performance: 19.2 TFlop/s),
  • SGI Altix UltraViolet shared-memory system ("SMP" component) with 120 CPU cores and 640 GB of globally addressable memory, and NumaLink5 interconnect (theoretical peak performance: 1.3 TFlop/s).

• GOLEM: older, AMD Opteron-based cluster with 390 cores and 800 GB of (distributed) main memory (theoretical peak performance: 1.6 TFlop/s).

FLOW and HERO use a dedicated, shared storage system (high-performance NAS Cluster) with a net capacity of 130 TB.

FLOW is employed for computationally demanding CFD calculations in wind energy research, conducted by the Research Group TWiST (Turbulence, Wind Energy, and Stochastis) and the ForWind Center for Wind Energy Research. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest system in Europe dedicated solely to that purpose.

The main application areas of the HERO cluster are Quantum Chemistry, Theoretical Physics, and the Neurosciences and Audiology. Besides that, the system is used by many other research groups of the Faculty of Mathematics and Science and the Department of Informatics of the School of Computing Science, Business Administration, Economics, and Law.

Hardware Overview

(Westmere-EP, 2.66 GHz)

(Nehalem-EX, "Beckton")

Advanced Usage

Here will you will find hints how to analyse and optimize your programs using HPC tools (profiler, debugger, performance libraries), and other useful information.

... tbc ...