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 processors. The SiCortex design is highly unusual; it pairs relatively slow individual processors (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. Moffett is best suited to very wide parallel jobs with very high communication needs and may be used to explore the scalability of parallel algorithms. Serial applications, on the other hand, would suffer from the individually slow processor speeds and are not recommended.

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 RCAC Biography of David Moffett.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Number of Nodes Processor Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect TeraFlops
756 633 MHz SiCortex 5832 6 8 GB SiCortex Interconnect Fabric 5.74

All Moffett nodes run Linux kernel version 2.6.18 and use SLURM and Maui 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).

About David Moffett