CCS: Institutes: CCRI: Background: Resources of CCS

Resources of CCS

The Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) provides state-of-the-art resources for high performance computational science and computing science research. The CCS offers storage resources as well as computing, networking and visualization resources.

As of Fall 2003, the primary CCS machines include:

Phoenix: (early evaluation) a Cray X1 with 224 multi-streaming processors (MSPs). Each MSP has 4 GB of memory, providing 896 GB of distributed, shared memory across the single system image.
Ram: (early evaluation) an SGI Altix with 256 processors. Each processor is a 1.3 GHz Itanium2 with 8 GB of memory. The total memory is then some 2 TB.
Cheetah: a 27-node IBM p690 System. The 27 "Regatta" nodes each have thirty-two 1.3 GHz Power4 processors. 19 of the nodes are 32-way while 8 of the nodes have been configured to have 4 8-way images denoted as "LPAR"s. The 8-way nodes have 8 GB of memory available. Most of the 32-way nodes have 32 GB of memory, but five of the 32-way nodes have 64 GB of memory and two of the 32-way nodes have 128 GB of memory.
Conversion to the IBM Federation interconnect is scheduled for Winter.
Eagle: a 184-node IBM RS/6000 SP. The 176 "thin" nodes have four 375 MHz Power3-II processors and 2 GB of memory while 8 "wide" nodes have two 375 MHz Power3-II processors and 2 GB of memory.
and a terascale data storage facility

The CCS-CCRI will be an active node on the developing Earth Systems Grid making easily accessible the DOE climate archives of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI ) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). CCS archive and data storage facilities are available for project use as well as remote accessibility through the Grid. Storage equipment consists of several robotic tape libraries. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement archive and NASA DAAC also use these libraries. The capacity of these data facilities will grow in coordination with the needs of CCS-CCRI projects.

High speed networks linking CCS to other national centers and the global Internet provide reliable and efficient services even for Terascale data projects. CCS is a first tier ESNet node currently operating at OC12.

Software tools provided by the CCS-CCRI include standard analysis systems such as GRADS, II and the PCMDI collection. Packages for managing software repositories are also available. Staff support in the CCS-CCRI is available to projects for system optimization and consultation.