Borg Cube - Data Assimilation
After 11 years of loyal service the borg collective had to be decommissioned in late 2020 due to a rapidly increasing number of hardware failures. Parts of its hardware live on in a machine called oneoffour.
To support our research in data assimilation the GeoComputing group operated a small cluster of four HP Proliant DL785 G5 machines. Each cluster node had the following technical specifications:
| total number of cores | 32 |
|---|---|
| number of CPUs | 8 |
| type of CPUs | AMD QuadCore Opteron 8384 (Shanghai) |
| clock speed | 2.7 GHz |
| L2 cache (per core) | 512 KB |
| L3 cache (per CPU) | 6 MB |
| local memory | 256 GB RAM |
| commissioned | March 2009 |
| decommissioned | October 2020 |
Buserror
Buserror was an HP Proliant DL835 G7 machine intended mainly for code development and test-bed for tuning our applications for multi-core systems. In this respect it acted as a mid-term replacement for our aging Coredump system. The role of Coredump as symmetric multi-processing (SMP) compute system with a large amount of directly addressable memory being taken by Segfault.
Buserror was financed by the International Graduate School THESIS (Complex Processes in the Earth: Theory, Experiments, Simulations).
| CPU type | AMD Opteron 6282SE |
|---|---|
| Number of CPUs | 2 |
| Modules per CPU | 8 |
| (Logical) Cores per CPU | 16 |
| Core frequency (normal, all core boost, max core boost) | 2.6 GHz / 3.0 GHz / 3.3 GHz |
| Caches (L1 / L2 / L3) | 8 x 64 KB code + 16 x 16 KB data / 8 x 2 MB / 1 x 16 MB |
| RAM | 32 GB |
| Local scratch space | 880 GB |
| Commissioned | August 2012 |
| Decommissioned | July 2022 |
Coredump
The GeoComputing group operated a symmetric multi-processing (SMP) system with 16 cores and 128 GB of main memory. It acted as compute server for applications requiring a huge amount of directly addressable memory and as a test-bed for porting our applications to multi-core systems.
The system itself was an HP ProLiant DL580 Generation 5 server with four Intel Xeon X7350 (Tigerton) Quad-Core CPUs and a directly attached 147 GB hard-drive (RAID 1). Primary characteristics of the X7350's are given below.
Coredump is attached to our NetApp mass-storage system (brutto capacity 50 TB) and was operated under Debian GNU/Linux.
| Clock speed | 2.93 GHz |
|---|---|
| L2 cache | 2 x 4 MB |
| Front Side Bus | 1066 MHz |
| Thermal Design Power | 130 W |
| Commissioned | April 2009 |
| Decommissioned | January 2018 |
Deadlock
The GeoComputing group operated an ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ESC4000 G3 Series server with 256 GB of main memory. It acted as compute server for applications requiring a huge amount of directly addressable memory and as a test-bed for porting our applications to multi-core systems. It was an Intel Broadwell based machine with 36 cores that can ran 72 threads (near) simultaneously making use of Intel's hyper-threading technology. The system had two Intel Xeon CPU E5-2695 v4 18-Core CPUs and a directly attached 22 TB hard-drive (RAID 6).
The machine was financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG) in the context of grant WAP INST 86/1619-1W.
| CPU type | Intel Xeon CPU E5-2695 v4 (2.10GHz) |
|---|---|
| CPU sockets | 2 |
| CPU cores | 36 |
| CPU threads | 72 |
| RAM | 256 GB |
| Local scratch space | 22 TB |
| Operating System | Debian GNU/Linux |
| Commissioned | April 2017 |
| Decommissioned | January 2025 |
Segfault
Our segfault system was a Fujitsu-Technology PRIMERGY RX600 S6 machine mainly intended for simulations in the context of computational seismology. It was an Intel Westmere-EX based machine with 40 cores that could run 80 threads (near) simultaneously making use of Intel's hyper-threading technology.
The machine was financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG) in the context of grant KA 2281/2-1.
| CPU type | Intel Xeon E7-4860 (2.27GHz) |
|---|---|
| CPU sockets | 4 |
| CPU cores | 40 |
| CPU threads | 80 |
| RAM | 256 GB |
| Local scratch space | 2 TB |
| Commissioned | October 2011 |
| Decommissioned | July 2022 |