Delivering an HPC Solution Progressive designs a 48-node cluster for a top technological institute of India
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ne of the top technological institutes based in North India wanted to add a HPC cluster to their setup to aid the extensive research activity that it conducts. The Institute imparts training to students to help them become competent engineers and scientists. It awards Bachelor, Master and Doctoral programs in various branches of technology and science.
A New Cluster
In Brief Challenge A top technological institute of India wanted to deploy an HPC cluster to help in their research activities. Since the Institute works in the cutting edge technology space, they had high expectations. And hence, this was a prestigious project. Solution Progressive designed an HPC cluster based on HP systems running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There was a master node and 48 compute nodes, all running on AMD Opteron processors. Gigabit interconnects were provided. OpenPBS was provided for job scheduling and Ganglia for monitoring. Benefits The Institute has got a solution, all parts of which are proven in the HPC space. The solution delivers high availability, and ease of management. Progressive helped the Institute all through the installation and acceptance period.
The Institute wanted to add a 48-node cluster to its existing high performance computing setup. For this it floated a tender and conducted due diligence. Progressive designed a cluster that was based on standard requirements for HPC clusters. The entire solution was based on HP’s hardware. Progressive’s solution was comprised of a master node and 48 compute nodes. The file system was NFS. Gigabit interconnects were suggested for connectivity. Job allocation and resource management was through OpenPBS, while the monitoring tool was Ganglia. The entire system was to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Compilers from Portland were also included in the solution. The Institute chose to go with this solution as it was convinced by Progressive’s technical expertise. This was a prestigious project as the cream of technology professionals of the country chose Progressive to deliver an HPC solution for them.
Leveraging HP’s Expertise
HP has considerable worldwide expertise in the HPC space. In India, however, HP had not had such a project so far. But with the organization’s expertise, and that of the Progressive and HP India team, a solution was arrived at. Since the entire cluster operation depends on the availability of the master node, Progressive went with an HP DL585 server for this. This is an AMD Opteron based model, with 16 GB of memory and SCSI storage. This node manages the authentication, file server and the entire cluster. The compute nodes were HP DL145, also Opteron-based. The interconnects provided were of high speed and low latency. The systems, interconnect, storage and software stack delivered for this solution are all proven in the HPC space. “It provided the flexibility to allow a submitted MPI workload to be executed across many nodes acting as one, or all nodes working in a uniform manner,” says the Solution Architect, Progressive Infotech. copyright © 2007