High Performance Computing
IDL as along experience in High Performance Computing (HPC) for over a decade, using message passing interface (MPI) and portable batch system. Applications include numerical weather prediction, global and regional climate modeling, ocean modeling and geodynamics. These are activities carried out by different research groups. In addition to access to several HPC infrastructures internationally via collaborative projects and computing time, IDL also has it’s own HPC equipment.
Equipment
The first HPC system was established in 2005, for Numerical Weather Prediction, the system included 16 computers (160 cores in total). In 2011 the group established a second system (TORNADO) necessary to run the EC-Earth Global Earth System Model, this system has 26 computers (576 cores). Most recently, the group acquired a third system (NIMBUS), whose system is essential for the new needs of high-resolution dynamical downscaling of climatic fields, for seasonal, decadal predictability and climate scenario studies, for the simulation of atmosphere-ocean coastal processes and geodynamics.
The current HPC systems have the following details:
800 CPUs (50 nodes) (different Intel architectures from X5560 to E5-2687 )
2.8 TB RAM (from 32Gb to 128 Gb per node);
400 TB storage;
Networks of 1Gb, 10Gb and Infiniband;
INTEL & GNU compilers including INTEL MPI and OpenMPI