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Windows HPC Server 2008 Cluster Titan (Outdated)

Warning

This page is deprecated! Titan is a former system!

The Dell Blade Server Titan is a homogenous cluster based on quad core Intel Xeon CPUs. The cluster consists of one management and 8 compute nodes, which are connected via a gigabit Ethernet network. The connection to the cluster is only available over a terminal server (titants1.hpcms.zih.tu-dresden.de, 141.30.63.227) via the remote desktop protocol.

The nodes are operated by the Windows operating system Microsoft HPC Server 2008. Currently, the following hardware is installed:

  • Compute Node:
Component Count
CPUs Intel Xeon E5440 Quad-Core
RAM per core 2 GB
Number of cores 64
total peak performance 724,48 GFLOPS
  • Management Node:
Component Count
CPUs Intel Xeon E5410 Quad-Core
RAM per core 2 GB
Number of cores 8

The management node shares 1.2 TB disk space via NTFS over all nodes. Each node has a local disk of 120 GB. The jobs for the compute nodes are scheduled by the Microsoft scheduler, which is a part of the Microsoft HPC Pack, from the management node. The job submission can be done via the graphical user interface Microsoft HPC Job Manager.

Two separate gigabit Ethernet networks are available for communication and I/O infrastructure.

CPU

The cluster is based on quad core Intel Xeon E5440 processor. One core has the following basic properties:

Component Count
clock rate 2.83 GHz
floating point units 2
peak performance 11.26 GFLOPS
L1 cache 32 KB I + 32KB on chip per core
L2 cache 12 MB I+D on chip per chip, 6MB shared/ 2 cores
FSB 1333 MHz

The management node is based on a quad core Intel Xeon E5410 processor. One core has the following basic properties:

Component Count
clock rate 2.33 GHz
floating point units 2
peak performance 9.32 GFLOPS
L1 cache 32 KB I + 32KB on chip per core
L2 cache 12 MB I+D on chip per chip, 6MB shared/ 2 cores
FSB 1333 MHz

The CPU belongs to the x86_64 family. Since it is fully capable of running x86-code, one should compare the performances of the 32 and 64 bit versions of the same code.