Carrying out climate simulations with numerical models requires very large high performance computation resources as well as large storage capabilities. Therefore, (CR)2 has two distributed processing and storage, environments available for scientific research in the atmospheric sciences.
Computational resources
Location: (CR)2 area on the University of Chile’s Computer Center
We have a distributed high performance computer cluster (with a Rocks operating system based on Centos), which allows us to carry out climate simulations. Its technical features are:
- Rocks Cluster Frontend: Camanchaca. Dell PowerEdge 2950, 8 cores Intel Xeon CPU X5450, 8G RAM, storage 2.4 TeraBytes
- Computer node 1: Panotia. Dell PowerEdge R720, 20 cores Intel Ivy Bridge E5-2660V2 (2 processors, with 10 cores which are all double threaded) 120 cores Xeon Phi 7120P (2 cards) 128GB RAM and a fast storage of 9 TeraBytes.
- Computer node 2: Gondwana. Dell PowerEdge R730, 28 cores Intel Xeon CPU E5-2697 (2 processors, with 14 cores which are all double threaded), 128GB RAM and a fast storage of 6 TeraBytes.
- Computer node 3: Pangea. Dell PowerEdge R710, 16 cores Intel E5530 (16 processors, 8 of which are threaded) 12G RAM and a fast storage of 6 TeraBytes.
For archiving the results of the simulations carried out in this environment we have:
- A storage facility:Cumulus. Dell PowerVault MD3600i with 180 TeraByte capacity (4 enclosures with 20TB, 40TB, 40TB y 80TB capacity, respectively).
- Two servers for storage and web services: Qhawayra. Dell PowerEdge R520, 24 cores Intel Xeon CPU E5-2430, 64G RAM and 8 TeraByte storage. Qhawayra2: Dell PowerEdge R530, 32 cores, Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630, 64G RAM and 8 TeraByte storage.
Location: National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (NLHPC) of the University of Chile’s Mathematical Modelling Center
Levque: Each user has access to 64 cores (8 per node) and to 3 GB RAM/core and with a disk space quota of 80 GB.
Leftraru: Each user has access to 120 cores, and the group has 5 TeraBytes of temporary storage space for their results. Leftraru has 128 HP SL230 and four HP SL250 computer nodes, 2640 Intel Ivy Bridge E5-2660V2 cores, 12 Xeon Phi 5110p, 5.4 TB of RAM, an Infiniband FDR connection of 56Gbits/s, 274TB high performance storage using DDN (EXAScaler)