Important: new HPC infrastructure in CINECA

[Carlo Cavazzoni]

Dear Users,

Please read this e-mail carefully.

Here we are announcing some important innovations in the CINECA HPC facility
that will take place in the next few months, in particular we
will replace SP5 and BCX with a new large SP6 system.

The schedule for the replacement will be as follow:
10 July 2009    - stop production on SP5 (queues will be closed)
10-17 July 2009 - users migration between SP5 and SP6
17 July 2009    - SP5 shutdown
20 July-15 September 2009 - users migration between BCX and SP6
30 September 2009   - BCX shutdown.
October 2009 - Installation of BlueGene/P system with 4096 PowerPC core

Important
---------
1) /scratch filesystems will NOT be migrated, they will be deleted
   when machines are switched off.
2) Further details will be given in next communications.

Some characteristic of SP6
--------------------------
168 Power6 575 nodes (5376 IBM Power6 4.7GHz cores, 21TByte of RAM) for an
aggregate
computing power of 101 Tflops (vs 3 Tflops of SP5 and 10 of BCX).
The network connection is based on infiniband.
The environment will be identical to SP5 (AIX OS, xlf, xlc compilers,
load leveler...)
One p575 node (32 cores, 128 GB shared memory) will be dedicated to
interactive postprocessing and visulization activities.
Two special (p560) nodes will be used for login.


the CINECA user support,
superc a cineca.it