The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has been operating a High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster since August 2009. The goal of this initiative is to provide the computational resources needed for modern scientific research in the various domains as a merit-based service to researchers locally and regionally. In late 2016, the cluster was upgraded to accommodate rising demand. The current cluster consists of 82 compute nodes, providing a total of 1,968 CPU cores, each with access to 5.33 GB of RAM, in addition to 16 accelerated compute nodes, each with a Tesla K80 dual GPU. Storage for input and output data is provided by a Lustre file system hosted on storage hardware with a total raw capacity of 288 TB. The cluster is wired with 40-Gbps QDR InfiniBand. The BA-HPC participated in the LinkSCEEM-2 project and continues to participate in joint calls with the Cy-Tera cluster operated by the Cyprus Institute. The majority of usage on the system comes from projects by researchers at Egyptian universities. In the VI-SEEM project, the BA is dedicating approximately 1.8 million core hours yearly for hosting applications given access to HPC resources through VI-SEEM. In addition, on the BA large-scale storage cluster, 100 TB are being dedicated to the VI-SEEM project.
Technical Specification
| Administrative Data | |
|---|---|
| Name | BA-HPC |
| Short Description | The Bibliotheca Alexandrina High-Performance Computing Cluster |
| Owner | Bibliotheca Alexandrina |
| Country | Egypt |
| Computational Power | |
| Number of servers | 98 |
| Server specification | Huawei FusionServer X6800 |
| CPU per server | 2 |
| RAM per server | 128 GB |
| Total number of CPU-cores | 1,968 |
| Max number of parallel processes | 3,926 |
| Interconnect type | QDR Infiniband |
| Interconnect latency | μs |
| Interconnect bandwidth | 40 Gbps |
| Local filesystem type | Lustre |
| Total storage (TB) | 288 |
| Accelerators type | Tesla K80 dual GPU |
| Number of accelerator cores | |
| Accelerators per server | 2 |
| Servers equipped with accelerators | 16 |
| Peak performance CPU (Tflops) | 88.14 |
| Peak performance accelerators (Tflops) | 29.92- |
| Peak performance (Tflops) | 118.06 |
| Real performance (Tflops) | 79.32 (of 88.14 “CPU Peak Performance”) |
| Operating system | CentOS |
| Version | 6.8 |
| Batch system/scheduler | Open Grid Scheduler |
| Development tools | GCC, Intel |
| Libraries | Managed via EasyBuild |
| Applications | Managed via EasyBuild |
| Dedication to VI-SEEM | |
| CPU (percent) | 20% |
| Storage (percent) | 2.5% |
| Accelerators (percent) | 10% |
| CPU (core-hours per year) | 3,4447,936 (increase from 1.8M before upgrade – approx. from 2.36 TFLOPS to 17.63 TFLOPS for one year) |
| Storage in TB | 7.2 (based on 20% of cluster before upgrade) |
| Accelerators (hours per year) | 28,032 (increase from 0 before upgrade – approx. 2.99 TFLOPS for one year) |
| Integration | |
| System operational since | Aug 2009 |
| Available to the project from | PM04 |
| Expected date system to be phased out | N/A |
| Interfaces | SSH |