NW-GRID Infrastructure
The core of NW-GRID centres around four sites at STFC Daresbury Laboratory and the Universities at Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester. The clusters at these sites are based on multi-core, multi-processor AMD Opteron nodes with at least 8GB memory per node and larger nodes of 16 and 32GB. Since the original project, funded by the North West Development Agency (NWDA) there are now additional parthers: University of Huddersfield and OCF plc.
The systems hosted at each core site currently are:
- Daresbury: 96 nodes 2.4 GHz twin dual-core CPU;
- Lancaster: 67 nodes 2.3 GHz twin quad-core CPU;
Liverpool: 104 nodes, 44 2.2 GHz, 8GB twin dual-core, and 60 2.3 GHz twin quad-core CPU (23×32 GB, 37×16 GB);
Liverpool: 108 nodes, 58 2.4 GHz, 8GB twin dual-core, and 50 32GB, 2.3 GHz twin quad-core CPU, all with InfiniPath interconnect. (Many of the nodes are funded and reserved for specific university groups, so are not generally available.) Accessible on approval for work needing a fast interconnect and large memory;
- Manchester: 25 nodes 2.4GHz twin dual-core CPU.
Some Daresbury, Lancaster and Liverpool systems have 8 TB of storage on Panasas parallel filesystem servers. Other systems at Daresbury are linked into a GPFS hierarchical and distributed file system. In addition to this are RAID arrays of 2.8 TB on Manchester and Liverpool and 24 TB on Lancaster and Liverpool systems. Nodes are connected by separate data and communications networks using Gigabit Ethernet except where noted.
Other Systems
Around this core are other computer systems that are connected to the NW-GRID.
- Daresbury and Huddersfield: IBM !iDataPlex - 40 compute nodes;
- Daresbury: 4 node IBM Power-7 system;
Daresbury: IBM BlueGene-P (4096 cores);
- Daresbury: 32 node Harpertown cluster, plus Nehalem and nVidia Tesla nodes;
- Lancaster: Viglen cluster
- Liverpool: 96 node, 196 core Xeon x86 cluster, with 2GB/node, and Myrinet 2000 interconnect, kindly donated by Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, with 5.7 TB of GPFS storage. Accessible on approval for work needing a fast interconnect with lower memory requirements;
- Liverpool: 960-node Dell cluster, Pentium IV processors (Physics);
- Manchester: 44 node dual-processor Opteron cluster, 2.5 TB RAID storage based on 2 GHz Opterons with 2 GB RAM;
- Manchester: SGI Prism with 8 Itanium2 processors and 4 ATI FireGL X3 graphics pipes;
- UCLAN 56-node SGI Altix.
For latest information about novel architectures available at Daresbury, which includes the nVidia and Power-7 systems, see the Web site of the EPSRC Distributed Computing Initiative.
Additional resources available to local users are Condor based Campus Grids at Daresbury, Huddersfield, Liverpool and Manchester. There is also a variety of Web servers dedicated to NW-GRID projects.
Older systems no longer in service
- Lancaster: 48 node Sun cluster (lancs1);
- Daresbury: 2560 node IBM 1.5 GHz Power5 (HPCx) - service ended on 31/1/2010;
Daresbury: IBM BlueGene-L;
- Daresbury: 32 node Woodcrest cluster;
- Lancaster: 124 node Sun cluster (galaxy);
Connectivity throughout the North West
The Grid infrastructure enables access to all of this hardware in a seamless fashion that can be highly automated. The Grid is now a key infrastructure for the North West science strategy and the NW-GRID project resonates strongly with the key elements of the NWDA’s regional strategy in particular in working with targeted emerging sectors in the environment, bio-technology and pharmaceutical and complex materials areas, establishing the North West as a global player in Grid technologies, e-research and in embedding e-competencies across the region’s business, academic and industrial base.
The compute clusters at the partner sites are complemented by a high-speed private network which can be enhanced and configured to meet all your requirements for secure access and data transfer between clusters and storage systems. All systems are supported by appropriate disk storage and data backup.
Project Reports and Documents
A Technology Roadmap for the NW-GRID (2005)
NW-GRID Production Phase Rollout Plan (2006)
Regulations for Use of the NW-GRID (2006)
Joining Procedures for the NW-GRID (2007)
NW-GRID Service Level Description for the National Grid Service (2007)
R.J. Allan, R.P. Tyer, P.A. Couch, J. Kewley, G. Coulsen, D. Hughes, R. Crouchley, D. Grose, J.M. Brooke, S. Nadeem, J. MacLaren, C. Addison and I. Smith "Status of Grid Middleware and Choices for NW-GRID" NW-GRID Technical Report (2007)
WP3: Extensions to the Grid Middleware (2007)
NW-GRID Final Report to NWDA (2009)