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 |