KEY INITIATIVES
ITEC - BRAZOS - NEXT GENERATION 9-1-1 - SCOOP - LEARN - MESONET - DREAMS
BRAZOS, the newest major computing cluster at Texas A&M University, is designed to meet the high-throughput computing needs of A&M's computational scientists and engineers. Though capable of executing modest MPI applications, brazos is optimized for handling large numbers of single-node computations. This form of computing is referred to as high-throughput or capacity computing.
The computing power of brazos comes from its (initially) 126 Computing Nodes, each a Dell PE 1950 with two quad-core Intel Xeon (Harpertown) processors. 96 nodes have 16 GBytes RAM each, and 30 nodes have 32 GBytes each. Total peak capacity is just over 10 teraflops.
Access to brazos is via a login node, a Dell server, also with two quad-core Xeons and 16 GBytes RAM. User home directories are supported on its 5 TByte file system.
Data storage is supported using the gluster parallel file system on a set of Dell servers, each with 12 TBytes capacity. Initially two servers are configured. Access to this data storage is supported by an external file access gateway, another Dell server.
Operating software for brazos includes the Linux operating system, GNU and Portland compilers, Maui/Torque/Gold cluster managers, several MPI and linear algebra packages, and numerous applications.The Compute Nodes and Servers of brazos are connected internally via an HP switch, with gigE connections to each Compute Node and 10gigE connections to the login node, the gluster servers, and the external file access gateway. The login node (with gigE) and the external file access gateway (with 10gigE) are connected to the campus network. The network connectivity of brazos, both within the cluster and to the campus network, is
shown here.
