Black

Overview of Black

The Black cluster is Purdue's portion of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) machine at Indiana University, the IU portion of which is known as "Big Red". Black consists of 256 IBM JS21 Blades, each a Dual-Processor 2.5 GHz Dual-Core PowerPC 970 MP with 8 GB of RAM and PCI-X Myrinet 2000 interconnects. The large amount of shared memory in this system provides very fast communication between processors via shared memory, making this system ideal for large parallel jobs.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Number of Nodes Processor Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect TeraFlops
256 Dual-Processor 2.5 GHz Dual-Core PowerPC 970MP 4 8 GB PCI-X Myrinet 2000 5.12

Aside from Myrinet, Black nodes are also connected by Gigabit Ethernet to a 266 TB GPFS filesystem, hosted on 16 IBM p505 Power5 systems.

All Black nodes run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and use LoadLeveler 3.4.0 and Moab for resource and job management. Operating system patches are applied monthly or as security needs dictate. All nodes have been configured to allow for unlimited stack usage, as well as unlimited core dump size (though disk space and server quotas may still be a limiting factor).