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The palmetto architecture
The palmetto system is a collection of 772 high-end computational nodes:
| Model | Processor | Count | L2 Cache (MB) | Cores | Memory (GB) | Name |
| Dell PE 1950 | Intel Xeon E5345 @2.33GHz x2 | 1 | 4 | 8 | 12 | user |
| Dell PE 1950 | Intel Xeon E5345 @2.33GHz x2 | 257 | 4 | 8 | 12 | node0001-0257 |
| Dell PE 1950 | Intel Xeon E5410 @2.33GHz x2 | 258 | 6 | 8 | 12 | node0258-0515 |
| Sun X2200 M2 x64 | AMD Opteron 2356 @ 2.3GHz x2 | 256 | 4 | 8 | 16 | node0516-0771 |
The palmetto cluster
Each compute node has a dual processor and each processor has four cores (quad-core) for a total of 6,176 cores for computation. Each Intel processor is rated at 2.33GHz and has 4 or 6 MB of cache. Each Sun processor is rated at 2.3GHz and has 4 MB of cache. Each Intel node contains 12 GBytes of memory and the Sun nodes contain 16 GBytes of memory each. Each node contains local disk (about half of which can be used for temporary user file storage.) The CPUs also support both 32- and 64-bit applications.
The CCIT staff have demonstrated a cluster performance of 46 TFlops in their own tests.
For more information on the Intel Xeon EF345, see Intel® Xeon® Processor 5000 Sequence, Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 5300 Series Product Brief, and Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 5300 Datasheet.
The E5345 Processor. Click for larger image.
For more information on the Sun X2200 M2, see Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server and AMD Opteron™ Processor Solutions.
The Sun Fire X2200 Server
Palmetto takes advantage of a multilevel file storage system and software. Local storage is provided with each compute node and longer term storage is provided via a 120 TByte StorageTek Model SL8500 storage system.
- Temporary/local storage: temporary storage areas can be created dynamically across a job's allocated nodes to store working set data. The Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), designed to provide reliable high performance and concurrent file access, will spontaneously create and destroy this space via PBS (the resource manager) prologue and epilogue scripts.
The PVFS file system. See the Clemson PVFS web page for a nice overview. - Long term storage: /home, /projsmall, and /projlarge directories are provided via Sun Microsystem's SAM-QFS Storage Management Software. SAM-QFS covers the full data services agenda from file access through backup and recovery. For more information on SAM-QFS, see Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager and Sun StorageTek QFS Software.
- Fast storage: Fast access (reads and writes) to storage will be provided by the Lustre file system. Also a product of Sun Microsystems, Luster is a scalable, production level file system. It is capable of aggregating petabytes of storage into a single file system. Lustre is open source, multi-vendor, multi-platform, and POSIX compliant. For more information, see the Lustre File System - Overview at the Sun Microsystems website.
Myrinet provides the high performance network between nodes within palmetto via 17 10G-SW32LC-16M linecards. The Myri-10G technology "leverages 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology into the HPC world, and HPC techniques into the Ethernet world". Fully compliant with Ethernet standards and supporting multiple OS platforms, Myri-10G provides throughput of 9.7-9.9 GBits/s.
A Myri-10G line card.
See the Myri-10G Overview for more information.
Palmetto and its storage system are housed at Clemson’s Information Technology Center in a 24/7 monitored environment with proper power, cooling and physical security.
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