PROTEUS Supercomputer
Carlos I Institute becomes one of the Andalusian research centers with the highest computing power. The University of Granada thus becomes a reference center for scientific supercomputing in Spain.
PROTEUS, since its inception, has had a great reception and demand, for which a constant series of improvements and extensions has been necessary.
A LITTLE HISTORY
The supercomputing service is inaugurated on the iC1. At that time, there were 24 processors and a power of 200 GFLOPs. The runtime environment was based on MOSIX and user accounts were shared by NFS.
It was expanded to 48 processors, with a power of about 500 GFLOPs.
First big update. Considerable increase in power (160 processors and 1500 GFLOPs). Onboarding full-time technical staff introducing the Condor queue manager and the GlusterFS distributed file system.
New extension. We now have 600 processors and 5500 GLOPs. As improvements to the environment, there are program restore points, data redundancy and secondary storage for backups.
Power is expanded to 1,100 processors and 13,000 GFLOPs. New to the system are better control over parallel programs with large memory needs, cloud storage and the addition of programmable graphics cards. The file system becomes CephFS-based.
Again, the number of processors and memory is expanded (1,300 processors and 27,000 GFLOPs). A low latency network, Infiniband FDR, is created that connects the last nodes for the execution of distributed jobs using MPI.
The management servers are reinforced so that the cluster is more robust against hardware failures, being able to continue operating despite the fact that these cause the fall of some nodes, obtained through the virtualization of the management nodes. The I / O backbone is enhanced with 10G connections. Backups are made on tapes. The LUSTER file system is created for high I / O rate and parallel writes.
New big update. 1100 new processors (2300 in total and 90000GFLOPs). Increased and improved file system capacity. Diskless execution nodes. Mathematica Licenses. SLURM queue manager. Lmod module environment.
SUPERCOMPUTERS
The fastest computer in the world, IBM’s SEQUOIA, is only about 1,000 times faster than PROTEUS, so it takes more than 15 minutes to do its job in 1 second, but still one second of PROTEUS is equivalent to to the non-stop work for three centuries of some seven million mathematicians with their hand calculators ”.
With PROTEUS,
the Carlos I Institute in the last five years has managed to multiply by ten the computing power available to researchers and members of the Institute from other organizations, who systematically use this sophisticated tool that technicians define as “network infrastructure for high-performance scientific computing ”.
The UGRGRID computer (in the process of expansion) now has a power of 5.5 Tflops for parallel processes, unlike PROTEUS which is designed for sequential calculations, which is more suitable for the use that is expected of it.
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