Moloch : Part of the IITAC cluster - decommissioned

The IITAC project has funded one large, 64bit, compute cluster (called iitac) for large scale parallel jobs and one medium, 32bit, compute cluster (called moloch) for serial jobs.

Brief Overview

Overview

The IITAC moloch cluster was purchased from IBM in late 2003. It a medium scale facility consisting of 130 Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors with a theoretical peak performance of 795 GFlops.

Operating system The nodes all run Debian Debian and was installed using the FAI installer Login There are two x345 nodes in the cluster. One of these, moloch.tchpc.tcd.ie, acts as login, compiling and job submission node. The other node is used for LDAP authentication. Compute There are 65 x335 compute nodes each containing two 3.06GHz Xeon processors, 2GB RAM and a 73GB SCSI scratch disk. Each node has dual onboard gigabit ethernet.

Moloch

Interconnect
Each nodes in the cluster is dual connected to a 240 port Cisco 4006 switch.

Disk storage
IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) runs across all nodes on the cluster. The cluster is connected to our S2A9500 storage system from Data Direct Networks. using GPFS's Cluster-to-Cluster mounting. This provides 48TB of high performance storage, in a RAID 6 configuration, for home directories.

A bit of history
This cluster was originally dubbed IITAC 1.5 as it was an interim resource to bridge the gap between the ageing IITAC cycle 0 cluster (called aegir) and the new IITAC cycle 3 cluster (called iitac).

Node Specifications

Last updated: Nov 05 2008