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 are based on multi core, multi processor AMD Opteron nodes with at least 8Gb memory per node and larger nodes of 16 and 32Gb. The nodes at each site are:
- Daresbury: 96 nodes 2.4 GHz twin dual-core CPU;
- Lancaster: 48 nodes 2.6 GHz twin dual-core CPU;
- Lancaster-2: 67 nodes 2.3 GHz twin quad-core CPU;
Liverpool lv3: 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 lv1: 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.
Daresbury, Lancaster and Liverpool lv3 have 8 TB of storage on Panasas parallel filesystem servers. In addition to this are RAID arrays of 2.8 TB on Manchester and Liverpool lv1 and 24 TB on Lancaster-2 and Liverpool lv1. Nodes are connected by separate data and communications networks using Gigabit Ethernet except where noted.
Around this core are other computer systems that are connected to the NW-GRID.
- Daresbury; 4 node IBM Power-7 system;
Daresbury: IBM BlueGene-L (2048 cores);
Daresbury: IBM BlueGene-P (4096 cores);
Daresbury: 2560-node IBM 1.5 GHz Power5 (HPCx - subject to approval) service ended on 31/1/2010;
- Daresbury: 32-node Harpertown cluster, plus Nehalem and nVidia Tesla nodes;
- Daresbury: 32-node Woodcrest cluster;
- Lancaster: 124-node Streamline/Sun cluster 2.4 GHz twin dual-core;
- Liverpool lv2: 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, Liverpool and Manchester (Lancaster soon). There is also a variety of Web servers dedicated to NW-GRID projects.
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)