Radon

Overview of Radon

The Radon cluster is composed of desktop PCs recycled from instructional computing labs. Radon is currently entirely 64-bit Dell systems with Intel Pentium4 or Xeon processors of various speeds and with memory configurations between 2 and 4 GB of RAM. Nodes are connected with either 100 MB or Gigabit Ethernet. The machines reclaimed from instructional labs are older, slower, and lack high-speed interconnects, so high-communication or sizeable multithreaded programs are not a good fit. Still, there are a fair number of machines, and some codes may be able to take advantage of these effectively.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Radon is currently divided into three different sub-clusters, each with a different combination of CPU speed, memory, and interconnect. Subcluster "a" nodes have 3.6 GHz single-core Intel Pentium4 CPUs, 2 GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet; subcluster "b" nodes, 3.2 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon CPUs, 2 GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet; and subcluster "c" nodes, 3.2 GHz dual-core Intel Xeon CPUs, 4 GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet.

Sub-Cluster Number of Nodes Processor Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect Theoretical Peak TeraFLOPS
radon-a[001-144] 144 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium4 1 2 GB Gigabit Ethernet 1.03
radon-b[001-048] 48 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon 2 2 GB Gigabit Ethernet 0.61
radon-c[001-048] 48 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon 2 4 GB Gigabit Ethernet 0.61

All Radon nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and use PBSPro 9.x 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).