Access to HECToR
The Phase 3 system (XE6) is contained in 30 cabinets and comprises a total of 704 compute blades. Each blade contains four compute nodes, each with two 16-core AMD Opteron 2.3GHz Interlagos processors. This amounts to a total of 90,112 cores. Each 16-core socket is coupled with a Cray Gemini routing and communications chip. Each 16-core processor shares 16Gb of memory, giving a system total of 90.1 Tb. The theoretical peak performance of the phase 3 system is over 800 Tflops.
There are 16 service blades on phase 3, each with two dual-core processor sockets. They act as login nodes, controllers for the I/O and for the network. There is one Gemini router chip for every two XE node. This Gemini chip has 10 network links which are used to implement a 3D-torus of processors.
The provisional cost of time on Hector is approximately £0.10 per core hour excluding VAT. A node (32 cores) therefore costs £3.24 per hour. Running a 1024 core job for 1 hour costs £103.78. This is roughly equivalent to a desktop machine running for 40 days.
The maximum job size is 2048 32-core nodes (65536 cores) and the minimum is 4 nodes (128 cores). The maximum job time is 12 hours and the shortest is 20 minutes.
The GPGPU system consists of four compute nodes connected by Quad-band Infiniband interconnects. All of the compute nodes have a single quad-core Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPU and 32 GB of main memory. Three of the compute nodes have 4 NVidia Fermi GPGPU cards installed and the remaining compute node has 2 AMD FireStream GPGPU cards installed.
For more information on HECToR see: www.hector.ac.uk. To apply for time on HECToR contact George Graham, telephone +44 (0) 131 651 3460 or +44(0) 777 370 8191.
