Location Watergraafsmeer - SGI Origin3000 ('TERAS')

About TERAS

TERAS (Greek for “monster”) is a typical general purpose massively parallel supercomputer, employing a total of 10924 processors, each with a peak performance of 1 Gflop/s. The machine is fitted with 500MHz R14000 CPUs organized in 256 4-CPU nodes and is equipped with 1 TByte of memory in total. 10 TByte of on-line storage and 100 TByte near-line StorageTek storage is available. 'TERAS' consists of 45 racks, 32 racks containing CPUs and routers, 8 I/O racks and 5 racks containing disks.

TERAS is a so-called CC-NUMA machine. The term CC-NUMA stands for Cache-Coherent Non Uniform Memory Access. In the CC-NUMA model, the system runs one operating system and shows only a single memory image to the user eventhough the memory is physically distributed over the processors. Since processors can access their own memory much faster than that of other processors, memory access is non uniform (NUMA). In this architecture the contents of the various processor caches should be coherent requiring extra hardware and a cache coherency protocol. A NUMA computer fulfilling these requirements is called a CC-NUMA machine.

Thanks to this memory structure and the underlying communication structure the machine can be used as a shared memory system, i.e. the memory appears to the user to be contained in a single address space and that can be accessed by any process. Nevertheless the use of OpenMP of MPI for explicitly parallel programming is recommended.

For reasons of reliability 'TERAS' is divided into several partitions each running its own operating system and single systenm image. Each partition is a CC-NUMA computer. Therefore, TERAS is a cluster of six shared memory parallel computers using a high bandwidth interconnect. The largest partition is 512 processoren. With MPI one can communicate throughout the partitions without significant loss of performance.

About SARA

SARA Computing and Networking Services is a center of expertise in the area of computers and networks. SARA supplies a complete package of High Performance Computing- and infrastructure services, based on state-of-the-art information technology.

SARA was founded in 1971 by the Free University in Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam and the Mathematical Center. In 1985 SARA acquired the status of National High Performance Computing Center and hosted the Dutch national supercomputer. Apart from this SARA hosts a number of other supercomputers, some of which in co-ownership with other universities.

SARA specializes in:

• High Performance Computing (production, manipulation, simulation and visualization of data)
• High Performance Networking
• Information Management
• Facility Management of computer systems and networks.
  

SARA offers her customers:

• High performance computer systems: vector, shared memory and distributed memory
• Experimental systems
• Virtual reality (CAVE and ImmersaDesk)
• Bulk data storage
• Advanced national and international networks
• Vast expertise in the areas of High Performance Computing and Networking, parallelization (PECA), optimalization of software, virtual reality and facility management.
  

For further information please contact: SARA Computing and Networking Services, Marketing and Sales Department, P.O. Box 94613, 1090 GP Amsterdam. Email: marketing@sara.nl.

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