Systems Overview

SciNet Systems

SciNet is a consortium for High-Performance Computing consisting of researchers at the University of Toronto and its associated hospitals. It is one of seven such consortia in Canada, which together form Compute/Calcul Canada.

SciNet has two main clusters:

General Purpose Cluster (GPC) The General Purpose Cluster is an extremely large cluster (ranked 16th in the world at its inception in June 2009, and the fastest in Canada) and is where most simulations are to be done at SciNet. It is an IBM iDataPlex cluster based on Intel's Nehalem architecture (one of the first in the world to make use of the new chips). The GPC consists of 3,780 nodes with a total of 30,240 2.5GHz cores, with 16GB RAM per node (2GB per core). Approximately one quarter of the cluster is interconnected with non-blocking 4x-DDR InfiniBand while the rest of the nodes are connected with gigabit ethernet. The compute nodes are accessed through a queuing system that allows jobs with a maximum wall time of 48 hours.

Tightly Coupled System (TCS) The TCS is a cluster of `fat' (high-memory, many-core) POWER6 nodes on a very fast Infiniband connection, which was installed in January of 2009. It has a relatively small number of cores (~3000), arranged in nodes of 32 cores with 128 GB of RAM on each node. It is dedicated for jobs that require such a large memory / low latency configuration. Jobs need to use multiples of 32 cores (a node), and are submitted to the LoadLeveler queuing system which allows jobs with a maximum wall time of 48 hours.