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High Performance Computing Systems

Glenn, the Ohio Supercomputer Center IBM Cluster 1350

Glenn IBM1350 ClusterThe Ohio Supercomputer Center's IBM Cluster 1350, named "Glenn", includes AMD Opteron multi-core technologies and the new IBM cell processors. The system offers a peak performance of more than 75 trillion floating point operations per second and a variety of memory and processor configurations. OSC's new supercomputer also includes blade systems based on the Cell Broadband Engine processor. This will allow Ohio researchers and industries to easily use this new hybrid HPC architecture.


The current hardware configuration consists of the following:

  • 877 System x3455 compute nodes
    • Dual socket, dual core 2.6 GHz Opterons
    • 8 GB RAM
    • 48 GB local disk space in /tmp
  • 650 System x3455 compute nodes
    • Dual socket, quad core 2.5 GHz Opterons
    • 24 GB RAM
    • 393 GB local disk space in /tmp
  • 88 System x3755 compute nodes
    • Quad socket, dual core 2.6 GHz Opterons
    • 64 GB (2 nodes), 32 GB (16 nodes), or 16 GB (70 nodes) RAM
    • 1.8 TB (10 nodes) or 218 GB (76 nodes) local disk space in /tmp
  • 10 System x3755 compute nodes
    • Quad socket, quad core 2.4 GHz Opterons
    • 64 GB RAM
    • 188 GB local disk space in /tmp
  • 1 e1350 Blade Center
    • 4 Dual Cell based QS20 blades
    • Voltaire 10 Gbps PCI Express adapter
  • 4 System x3755 login nodes
    • Quad socket 2 dual core 2.6 GHz Opterons
    • 8 GB RAM
  • All connected together by 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps Infiniband

Using Glenn, the IBM 1350 Opteron Cluster at OSC

Ohio Supercomputer Center BALE Cluster

BALE ClusterThe OSC BALE Cluster is a distributed/shared memory hybrid system constructed from commodity PC components running the Linux operating system.


The current hardware configuration consists of the following:

The BALE Theater Cluster consists of 55 Workstation nodes and one login node configured with:

  • Motherboard: ASUS M2NPV-VM
    • graphics: nVIDIA GeForce 6150+nForce 430
    • Ethernet: gigE on board (login node has an extra gigE card)
  • Processors: AMD Athlon 64 X2 DualCore EE 4200+ (2.2GHz) AM2 Socket L2=512KB
  • RAM: 4x1 GB PC5300 ECC DDR2 667MHz
  • Infiniband: PCI-Express (8x) Single Port 4X Infiniband HCA Card - MemFree
  • Hard Drive: 250GB SATA II Hard Drive 7200RPM w/ 16MB Cache
    • login node: 2 x 500GB SATA II Hard Drive 7200RPM w/ 16MB Cache

The GPGPU/Visualization cluster consists of 18 nodes, each contains:

  • two AMD 2.6GHz Dual-Core Opteron CPU's
  • 8 GBs of RAM
  • 750 GB SATA hard disk
  • two NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 Graphics cards
  • Infiniband Dual Port HCA card
  • Each Quadro FX 5600 card has 1.5GBs of onboard, high-speed memory and is capable of 330 peak Gflops

Using the BALE cluster at OSC

Ohio Supercomputer Center Mass Storage Environment

Mass Storage SystemThe Mass Storage Environment (MSE) at OSC consists of servers, data storage
subsystems, and networks providing a number of storage services to OSC HPC
systems.  The current configuration consists of:


  • Cisco MDS9509 Storage Directors with Fibre Channel and iSCSI blades
  • IBM FastT-900 storage servers
  • IBM FastT-600 storage servers
  • Hitachi AMS1000 storage
  • DataDirect Networks 8500 storage
  • local disk storage on each compute node
  • One IBM 3584 tape robot:
    • Four Fibre Channel links.
    • Four LTO tape drives.
    • 80 TB (raw capacity) of LTO tapes.
  • The servers for the home directories are 18 x3650s with the following:
    • 16GB memory
    • 2 Intel Xeon E5440 2.83GHz quad-core CPUs
    • 2, 1 Gb/s Ethernet network interfaces
    • 4Gb/s Fibre-channel host bus adapter

Home Directory Service

The MSE provides common home directories across all OSC HPC systems. Each userid has a quota of 500GB storage and 1000000 files for its home directory tree.

For projects that require more than 500GB storage and/or more than 1000000 files, additional storage space is available. Principal Investigators should contact the OSC consultation service about procedures for making additional storage available in the "project" space outside the home directory.

Note: To transfer files to/from OSC systems, use scp or sftp between your system and any of the HPC login nodes. Since home directories and "project" space are shared across all systems, you can use any system to transfer files.

The local storage on each compute node is used for scratch space (/tmp) and spool space for stdout and stderr from batch jobs.  Some nodes have large scratch space.  See the usage sections for each cluster for additional information.

Parallel File System Service

The MSE provides a parallel file system for use as high-performance shared scratch space using PVFS2. The current capacity of the PVFS2 subsystem is about 100TB.

Backup Service

All files on the home directories and on the "project" space are backed up daily. Two copies of files in the home directories are written to tape in the tape library. A single copy of files on the "project" space is written to tape. Files on the local scratch (/tmp) and on PVFS are not backed up.