Moffett

Overview of Moffett

Moffett is a SiCortex 5832 system. It consists of 28 modules, each containing 27 six-processor SMP nodes for a total of 4536 processor cores. The SiCortex design is highly unusual; it pairs relatively slow individual processor cores (633 MHz) with an extraordinarily fast custom interconnect fabric, and provides these in very large numbers. In addition, the SiCortex design uses very little power and thereby generates very little heat. Very wide parallel jobs with very high communication needs and exploring the scalability of parallel algorithms are suitable applications for Moffett. Serial applications are not suitable since they would suffer from the slow speeds of individual processors.

Namesake

Moffett is named in honor of David Moffett, the late Associate Vice President for Research Computing and Purdue graduate. More information about his life and impact on Purdue is available in an ITaP Biography of David Moffett.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Number of Nodes Processors per Node Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect TeraFlops
756 One 633 MHz Six-Core SiCortex 5832 6 8 GB SiCortex Interconnect Fabric 5.74

All Moffett nodes run Linux kernel version 2 and use SLURM and Maui for resource and job management. 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).

About David Moffett