It has been a long time in coming, several years in fact, but the first of our new worker nodes went live today on our POC cluster. There is still much to be done, Infiniband is not yet ready, the new cluster head node is not live yet, the new storage has not been configured and there is an entire project underway to ensure that there is enough power and aircon in our data centers to run all of this kit. More on these items in the next few weeks.
However in the meantime we will be bringing some more worker nodes online for several select researchers to test. Observant readers will note from the image that the new GPU servers are already being ‘tested’.
The specs of the new worker nodes:
Dell C6420 servers in a C6400 chassis. Dual Xeon 6138 CPUS with 20 cores each bringing a total of 40 Gold class 2GHZ cores and 384GB of 2.666GHZ RAM per worker node. Each chassis is 2U and holds 4 servers, giving a total of 160 cores in 2U of rack space.
We will be deploying 7 chassis with 28 servers, one of which will function as a head node. Eventually the worker nodes from our existing clusters will be also be moved to this new cluster.