In January 2009 TPAC and UTAS undertook a major infrastructure project to upgrade the HPC facility. Its 3 year lease end date was fast approaching on September 1 2009. After consultation with vendors and end users TPAC/UTAS finally came to the decision to replace the existing HPC Whiteout.sf.utas.edu.au, an Itanium based SGI Altix 4700, with an SGI Altix ICE 8200 Xeon based cluster to be known as Katabatic.sf.utas.edu.au.
The decision to go to a Xeon based cluster opens up a much larger range of software to be supported on the system as major software vendors are dropping their support of the Itanium based architecture.
In that, UTAS has acquired a 512 Core Xeon based cluster, being made up of 128 cores of Harpertown based Xeons, and 384 cores of the new ultra fast Nehalem based Xeon CPUs. On top of the 4 fold CPU core count, the cluster has just over 1Tb of addressable memory across its 64 compute nodes.
On top of all that, we have also replaced the SAN infrastructure with new SGI IS220 SAN trays giving us 72Tb of RAW storage, and 18Tb of high speed SAS disk. Also, TPAC now has it’s own tape library in a 950 slot Spectra Logic T950 (LTO4 based) with a potential capacity of 1Peta byte of near line storage.
^ Spectra Tape library, and SAN Rack
^ SGI Altix Ice 8200 Compute Rack
