OSC’s Annie Oakley HP-built Intel Xeon Cluster
Recent Ohio Supercomputer Center systems have been named after important Ohio pioneers. The Glenn Cluster honors astronaut and statesman John Glenn, while the Csuri Advanced GPU environment recognizes computer artist Charles “Chuck” Csuri. The center’s next system has been dubbed Oakley, to pay tribute to sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
Oakley was born in a log cabin in western Ohio’s Darke County in 1860 and died in Greenville 66 years later. She learned to shoot a gun at the age of eight and leveraged that skill to become one of the most famous sharpshooters in American history. She could strike a small metal coin thrown in the air twenty-seven meters away, remove the ashes from a cigarette her husband would hold in his mouth, and hit the thin edge of a playing card, shooting it six more times as it fell to the ground.
For 16 years, Oakley performed as a celebrated markswoman in a traveling Wild West show with “Buffalo Bill” Cody and was introduced to kings, queens and Indian chiefs. She met the famous Native American chief, Sitting Bull, at a performance with her husband, Frank Butler. The chief liked her skill in shooting and her personality so much, he gave her the nickname “Little Sure Shot.”
After retiring from the traveling show, Oakley offered to help the military during World War I by training a group of women volunteers who would become soldiers in the war. Her request ignored, she instead visited many training camps to give shooting demonstrations and raise money for medicine and supplies. In her storied life, Annie overcame poverty, mistreatment and physical injury, helped to break barriers for women with her talent and accomplishments and showed great compassion and generosity to orphans, widows and other young women. |
Researchers using Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) resources will soon be able to conduct even more innovative academic and industrial research by accessing an energy-efficient, GPU-accelerated supercomputer system delivered today.
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OSC engineers working on the decommission of Glenn (Phase 1) in preparation for the Oakley cluster installation. |
OSC’s new $4.1 million HP-built, Intel® Xeon® processor-based supercomputer, dubbed the Oakley Cluster, will feature more cores (8,328) on half as many nodes (694) as the center’s current flagship system, the IBM Opteron 1350 Glenn Cluster. The Oakley Cluster can achieve 88 teraflops, tech-speak for performing 88 trillion calculations per second, or, with acceleration from NVIDIA® Tesla™ graphic processing units (GPUs), a total peak performance of 154 teraflops.
The new system will provide nearly twice the memory per core (4 gigabytes) and three times the number of graphic processing units or ‘GPUs’ (128). The Oakley Cluster also will provide researchers with one and a half times the performance of the Glenn Cluster at just 60 percent of Glenn’s power consumption and will expand OSC storage to nearly two petabytes with 600 terabytes of new DataDirect Lustre storage.
Detailed System Specifications
- 8,328 total cores
- 12 cores/node & 48 gigabytes of memory/node
- Intel Xeon x5650 CPUs
- HP SL390 G7 Nodes
- 128 NVIDIA Tesla M2070 GPUs
- QDR IB Interconnect
- Low latency
- High throughput
- High quality-of-service.
- Theoretical system peak performance
- GPU acceleration
- Total peak performance
- Memory Increase
- Increases memory from 2.5 gigabytes per core to 4.0 gigabytes per core.
- Storage Expansion
- Adds 600 terabytes of DataDirect Networks Lustre storage for a total of nearly two petabytes of available disk storage.
- System Efficiency
- 1.5x the performance of current systems at just 60 percent of current power consumption.
For up-to-date technical information on the Oakley cluster installation, please visit https://armstrong.osc.edu/pg/groups/4968/oakley-deployment-amp-transition/. |
