Supercomputing
Supercomputing provides the computing power needed to carry out unimaginable analyzes for a personal computer (PC): from the simulations required to design ports or marine structures, to the analysis of tsunamis or tropical cyclones.
Due to the nature of the research work carried out at IHCantabria, supercomputing is part of our daily work.
The first supercomputing cluster the centre had was Poseidon. Poseidon was formed by 15 calculation nodes, with a total of 132 cores and 224 GB of RAM.
In March 2012 a new supercomputing cluster (Neptune) was acquired, surpassing by more than 90% the computational resources of the old cluster.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Neptune has 2 Racks with 80 computing nodes and a speed of 30 Teraflops. The model of nodes that form Neptune are: IBM iDataPlex dx360 M4, the same one that had the Marenostrum III.
Each node has 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 Sandy Bridge CPUs, operating at 2.6 GHz, providing 16 cores per node. The physical memory per node is 64 GB. This gives us a capacity of 1280 cores and 5 TB of RAM.
The interconnection between nodes, has an Infiniband FDR10 network ensuring high speed communication between the nodes and the storage infrastructure is deployed on a distributed storage with IBM GPFS technology with a total of 130 TB of available space.
The main technologies we use to manage the cluster are the following:
- CentOS operating system.
- Slurm as task planner and resource management.
- Easybuild and Lmod to deploy and use software.
Expertise AREAs
Climate modelling and characterisation
Modeling of offshore structures
Coastal morphodynamics modeling
Modelling of port infrastructures
Modelling of meteoceanographic conditions
Tsunami modeling
