Newton Update

The second stage of the expansion of the SGI Altix facility has now been completed.

In the first stage the original 256 processor Altix (Newton) had its memory increased to 512 Gigabytes, and an additional 128 processor Altix machine was added to the service, also with 512 Gigabytes of memory. While the two machines function as separate entities, they have enabled a higher throughput of work by allowing common job submission to the batch system, with the scheduler able to select the most appropriate resource on which to execute the code. The newer machine, which at this stage is referred to as newtd, also allows jobs to run which require a larger amount of memory per processor than on the original newton, with up to 4 Gigabytes per process available.

The second stage involved the addition of a further 128 processors to newtd, further increasing the computational capacity of the Altix service to 512 processors. These additional processors are 1.5 GHz Intel Itanium 2 chips with 6 Megabytes of tertiary cache compared to the original set of chips which are 1.3 GHz processors with 3 Megabytes of tertiary cache. These newest processors are to be made available either as part of the normal pool of up to 496 processors available for batch work, or as a separate queue of up to 128 processors for jobs which specifically request these faster Itaniums. This stage also saw the final configuration of the memory available for jobs being set at 2 Gigabytes per processor.

The final stage will be the rehousing of the two Altix machines in a new building and the combination of newton and newtd to form a single 512 processor system with 1 Terabyte of memory. This final configuration will allow jobs with high processor counts and large memory requirements to run across the entire system, further extending the range of scientific research which will be possible on the CSAR systems.

Please note that there is an opportunity to vire resources from HPCx if you wish to do so.