Computational Power of AFT

One of AFT's computer clusters.

AFT owns its own in-house super-computers to assure customers are never forced to wait for adequate computational resources. Our main computational workhorse is a SGI Altix XE 1300 cluster, composed of a Altix XE 210 head node and 8 Altix XE 320 compute nodes. Each node has 2 64-bit Intel Xeon 5160 chips (dual core, 2.66 GHz), 4GB of memory and a 250GB SATA disk. For storage the cluster relies on a RAID array of 3TB arrange in a 6+1 LUN and 1 hot spare configuration, which give double redundancy. While more expensive than PC-style processors, the 64-bit architecture was specifically chosen because high Reynolds number RANS calculations rely solely on double-precision arithmetic. High-end chip sets like these are also essential because of the large quantities of data exchange taking place in RANS. Efficient data flow rates on AFT’s machine are maintained because each of the CPU’s has its own onboard 6.0 Mbyte L2 cache. On this cluster we can run up to 36 single thread jobs, or up to 9 4 threaded jobs.

When additional computational power is needed, AFT’s second cluster is used: this is a 16-processor, 64-bit Itanium-2, SGI Altix-350.  Total system memory (RAM) is 64 GBytes, and is globally shared so that is potentially all available for a single job or multiple concurrent jobs can run simultaneously and share it. Parallel performance is achieved using SGI’s NUMALink high-speed interconnect, and can handle up to 6.4 GBytes per second of traffic between CPU’s. A 1.0 TByte disk storage is available across two stripped RAID containers to insure data security and redundancy. Intel compilers are used for both scalar and parallel applications. OpenMP is used for parallelization.

Every machine at AFT is maintained 24/7 with UPS coverage to protect against data loss during brown out. We also maintain an industry leading OpenBSD firewall to provide the ultimate in customer security. Data visualization is handled using SGI workstations, while Windows-based PC’s are used to insure compatibility with every customer need.