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South Africa’s Stellenbosch University now has a high-performance Sun Fire cluster running OpenSuse Linux, courtesy of Breakpoint Solutions.
The high performance cluster is built using Sun Fire X4150 servers, with each having two Intel Quad Core CPUs and 16 gigabytes of memory. The cluster includes a Sun StorageTek 2530 array with six terabytes of storage, an Extreme Networks Summit 1GBE switch and the Sun Grid Engine job scheduler.
“There are 168 cores in total,” says mechanics division head within the department of mechanical and mechatronic engineering, professor Gerhard Venter. “In testing we have been using between 80 and 120 cores at any given time and without any problems.”
Venter says “the university had no shared resource for this before. Instead, various departments ran their own box-clusters that typically have less than 20 cores. These are used to crunch numbers in research in fields such as chemistry and physics.”
He says that several departments within the university have already begun testing the solution in their research projects.
“Mechanical and mechatronic engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, bio-chemistry, physics and applied mathematics are just some of the departments that will be loading the system with work once the testing phase is done,” says Venter.
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Thanks Alastair my Mac now has drool all over it. 168 cores….. /wipes eyes…. hectic!
@chukaman:
Yeah, my dual core is suddenly looking really sad.
[...] to some good news: Stellenbosch University is going to have a lot of fun. South Africa’s Stellenbosch University now has a high-performance Sun Fire cluster running [...]