High-Performance Computing

Compute Servers

What are they?

The management server has this specification

Dual Eight Core Intel Xeon E5-2620v4 Processors
128GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered Memory
5x 2TB SATA Hard Disk Drives
Intel X540-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Ethernet Adaptor

The eight compute servers each have this specification

Dual Ten Core Intel Xeon E5-2630v4 Processors
128GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered Memory
2x 1TB SATA Hard Disk Drives
Onboard Intel X540 Dual Port 10GBase-T

The Operating System used on all of these servers is CentOS 7. The servers are managed using a combination of the Bright Cluster Manager 7 and Kubernetes.

Where are they?

All of the servers are installed in the University House Data Centre at the University of Warwick.

What are they used for?

WISB researcher’s computational tasks can be deployed on these servers using the Slurm Workload Manager. More complex services can be deployed using the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

For more information contact wisb.computing@warwick.ac.uk

Storage Servers

What are they?

The storage server and the backup server have the following specification

Dual Eight Core Intel Xeon E5-2620v4 Processors
256GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered Memory
2x Intel DC S3500 Series 120GB SSDs
2x LSI9200-8E SAS Host Bus Adapters
Intel X540-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Ethernet Adapter
60 Bay SAS JBOD with Redundant Power and Dual SAS Controllers
18x 4TB SAS Hard Disk Drives

The Operating System used on these storage servers is FreeBSD 10. The Z File System (ZFS) is used to store the data. The file system is constructed using a pool containing two nine-disk RAIDZ2 virtual devices. This provides redundancy in the case of disk failure. Regular snapshots of the data are created and transferred to the backup storage server.

Where are they?

The production server is installed in the University House Data Centre. The backup server is installed in a different location, the Argent Court Data Centre also at the University of Warwick.

What are they used for?

Data originating from two primary sources is stored on these servers

Equipment in the WISB Research Technology Facility.
Computational work output.

After the initial installation there is 47.96 TiB of space available. As it becomes necessary, new hard disk drives will be added to increase the space available to a maximum of approximately 200 TiB.

The storage server is generally accessible on RTF equipment computers through mapped network drives.