CISL Annual Report 2005 > Production cyberinfrastructure plans

Linux cluster plans

Operating and expanding coral, the IMAGe Linux cluster

Early in FY2006, IMAGe's cluster, coral, with 32 processors, PCI Express^® InfiniBand^® interconnect and 6 TB of RAID storage, will be put into full production. Two additional EM64T visualization nodes will be integrated into the coral system, sharing access to the attached RAID storage system. This will enable testing of the VAPOR visualization technology on real IMAGe turbulence data. If warranted by demand and available equipment funds, the possibility of increasing the number of processors in coral from 32 up to a total of 54, will be considered in FY2006 as well.

With its tight integration of compute, visualization, and data analysis capabilities, the coral cluster is a unique computational resource within CISL. We expect this tight coupling, which more closely matches scientific workflow, to lead to increased scientific productivity, bypassing numerous data transfer bottlenecks. Success with coral in this regard will help shape future, larger scale SCD deployments.

The Linux cluster system coral.