Hansen

Overview of Hansen

Hansen is a compute cluster operated by ITaPand is a member of Purdue's Community Cluster Program. Hansen went into production on September 15, 2011. Hansen consists of Dell compute nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6176 processors (48 cores per node), either 96 GB, 192 GB, or 512 GB of memory, and 250 GB of local disk for system software and local scratch storage. All nodes have 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects and a 5-year warranty.

Namesake

Hansen is named in honor of Arthur G. Hansen, former Purdue president and alumnus and supercomputing proponent. More information about his life and impact on Purdue is available in an ITaP Biography of Arthur G. Hansen.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Hansen consists of three logical sub-clusters, each with a different amount of memory. Hansen-A nodes have 96 GB RAM; Hansen-B, 192 GB RAM; Hansen-C, 512 GB RAM. All nodes have 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects.

Sub-Cluster Number of Nodes Processors per Node Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect Disk TeraFLOPS
Hansen-A 103 Four 2.3 GHz 12-Core AMD Opteron 6176 48 96 GB 10 GigE 250 GB 48.8
Hansen-B 93 Four 2.3 GHz 12-Core AMD Opteron 6176 48 192 GB 10 GigE 250 GB 40.2
Hansen-C 5 Four 2.3 GHz 12-Core AMD Opteron 6176 48 512 GB 10 GigE 250 GB .9

Hansen nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) and use Moab Workload Manager 6 and TORQUE Resource Manager 3 as the portable batch system (PBS) for resource and job management. Hansen also runs jobs for BoilerGrid whenever processor cores in it would otherwise be idle. The application of operating system patches occurs as security needs dictate. All nodes allow for unlimited stack usage, as well as unlimited core dump size (though disk space and server quotas may still be a limiting factor).

For more information about the TORQUE Resource Manager:

On Hansen, ITaP recommends the following set of compiler, math library, and message-passing library for parallel code:

  • PGI 11.8
  • ACML
  • OpenMPI 1.4.4

To load the recommended set: 

$ module load devel

To verify what you loaded: 

$ module list
About Arthur G. Hansen