High Performance Computing Cluster (HPC Cluster)


Introduction

In the past, the High Performance Computing (HPC) machine was referred as one big, powerful and comparatively expensive supercomputer. Nowadays, a group of powerful computers can be used to form a HPC Cluster. Usually one or two computers (Head Node) are responsible for lining up and dispatching the computing jobs to the other computers (Computing Nodes) in the cluster. The HPC Cluster provides more processing cores which result in higher computing power for facilitating compute-intensive research projects. With the collective processing power provided, the computational time can be shortened dramatically. It is ideal for research projects that need high performance computing for statistical analysis, image processing, simulation, etc.

ICTO started the feasibility study of deploying HPC Cluster in UM and conducted user requirement survey in early 2010. Finally, the first HPC Cluster test bed, named ‘Pearl-Alpha’ is deployed in September 2011.

Within the half-a-year testing period, ‘Pearl-Alpha’ has processed over 1,500 computing jobs, which is far beyond our expectation. All the academic and research staff who participated in the pilot testing have positive comments and believe that HPC Cluster would be an essential equipment in future academic and research projects. In order to provide full support to the University academic research work, we decided to set up a production HPC Cluster namely ‘Pearl’ . The cluster is officially launched in April of 2012. It is the first HPC Cluster in Macao which is based on both Intel Xeon hex-core CPU and InfiniBand 4x QDR 40Gb/s high-speed optical fiber communication technologies.

‘Pearl’ contains 9 double blade servers which provides 216 processing cores in total. HPL testing result shows its Rmax reaches 2,240 GFLOPS. Comparing with the Rpeak which is 2,652 GFLOPS, the overall efficiency is 84%. ‘Pearl’ is now the largest scale of HPC Cluster among the higher educational institutes in Macao.

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