Venice

Overview of Venice

Venice is a small cluster of Sun x4600 systems consisting of two front-end nodes and three compute nodes. The front-end nodes are both a Quad-Processor Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2216. The compute nodes are each an Eight-Processor Dual-Core AMD Opteron 8220 with 128 GB of RAM. The large amount of shared memory in this system makes it ideal for large parallel jobs, using shared memory for fast communication between processors. Compared to systems like Caesar, Venice cluster nodes have fewer processors per node, so sizable multithreaded programs (parallel codes that do not use MPI) will be a poorer fit.

Detailed Hardware Specification

Number of Nodes Processor Cores per Node Memory per Node Interconnect TeraFlops
3 Eight-Processor 1 GHz Dual-Core AMD Opteron 8220 16 128 GB Gigabit Ethernet 0.096

All Venice nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) 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).