Brutus
From ScientificComputing
Introduction
Brutus (Better Reliability and Usability Thanks to Unified System) is a central high-performance cluster of ETH Zurich. It is jointly owned by nearly 50 professors in 12 departments and the IT Services, who are responsible for the acquisition and management of the system. The focus of Brutus was put on high-throughput.
Life time
2007-2016
Wiki
Compute nodes
Brutus is a heterogeneous system containing 11 different kinds of compute nodes:
- Standard nodes
- 120 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM (5760 cores)
- 24 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (576 cores)
- 410 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8380 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (6560 cores)
- 80 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (1280 cores)
- Large-memory (fat) nodes
- 6 nodes with four 8-core Intel Xeon E7-8837 CPUs and 1024 GB of RAM (192 cores) — NEW!
- 80 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (3840 cores)
- GPU nodes — GPUs disabled after CVE-2016-5195
- 18 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 2 Nvidia Fermi C2050 GPUs (432 cores + 36 GPUs)
- 2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 6 Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPUs (24 cores + 12 GPUs)
- 2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and various Nvidia and AMD GPUs (24 cores + 2 GPUs)
- Legacy nodes
- 256 nodes with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2220 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM (1024 cores)
In total Brutus contains 19,872 cores, plus a few hundreds in the cluster's file servers, login nodes and management nodes.
The peak performance of Brutus is slightly over 200 teraflops (200 × 1012 floating-point operations per second).
Networking
- All nodes are connected to the cluster's Gigabit Ethernet backbone
- All nodes (except the 256 with Opteron 2280 CPUs) are connected to a high-speed InfiniBand QDR network
Trivia
- Brutus was ranked the 88th fastest computer in the world in November 2009 (top500.org)
- It was at this time the most energy efficient general purpose supercomputer in the world (Heise.de)
