There is one Interactive node, namely the hpcpower.hku.hk. It is reserved for user login, program modification, compilation and job queue submission/manipulation etc. It also contains 700GB of RAID disk for user files accessible from all nodes.
There are 128 compute nodes (or called batch nodes) which are used for batch processing only. Users cannot login to these nodes, but users can submit jobs to be executed in these nodes through the PBS job queue system.
Each compute node is a IBM x335 server that consists of:
- A IBM x335 1U Rackmount server
- Dual Intel Pentium Xeon 2.8GHz processors
- 512 KB level two ECC cache
- 2GB RAM
- A 40GB IDE hard disk
- A CDROM drive and a 1.44MB Floppy disk drive
- Dual integrated 10/100/1000 ethernet ports
- RS-485 bus using Cable Chain Technology (C2T) connection
The master node is a IBM x345 server. It also consists of dual 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium Xeon processors and 2 GB RAM. This server also includes five 146GB hard disks forming a RAID to provide file services for the entire cluster.
Network:
- Two CISCO 4506 series switches are used to link up all computation nodes and the interactive node via gigabit ethernet connection. For the two networks formed, one is for the private NFS file system and one is for the inter-processor MPI communication.
Directories:
- /home is located at the interactive node. User files are stored here.
- /share is located at the interactive node. Commonly used files are stored here.
- /sharedtmp is located at the interactive node. It can be read and write from all nodes. It’s size is 20GB.
Each slave node has 25GB of local /tmp directory.