Santander Meteorology Group

A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate

The research activities of the group are supported by a computing infrastructure which is also used for GRID computing activities, including a preproduction laboratory to test and tune the applications before running them in the production resources. Thus, our cluster have the same characteristics that can be found in big production clusters (infiniband, shared storage, etc.).

This infrastructure is fully operative since 2006 and it is part of the National Grid Initiative (es-NGI), the European Grid Initiative (EGI) and the EELA Grid infrastructure. Moreover, our group is a certified support group for Earth-Science and Artificial Intelligence applications in the Spanish E-Science network.

The cluster is physically located in the Facultad de Ciencias CPD (Univ. Cantabria) and the installation and management is done in collaboration with the Servicio de Informatica (IT Service) of Cantabria University.

Apart from the cluster itself, a production XEN cluster is used to host the following virtual machines: NAT (server for routing between internet and the false network), VPN (access to the false network), MONITOR (Ganglia and Nagios), MAR (user interface), UI, CE, SE and MON (gLite Services). There is also another physical machine that manage the main services provided by the group (SERVICES).

Overall the infrastructure has 242 cores and 158 TB (hard-disk).
=>[Short course for use of the PBS system (Spanish)]
=>[Ganglia monitoring system]

BLADE (2010):

 
Model: SuperMicro TwinBlade
Processor: 2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5620  (4 Cores, 12M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 5.86 GT/s Intel® QPI)
   Memory: 16 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 250GB
  Network: 2 Gigabit 
          OS: CentOS 5.4
    Nodes: 12
Total Cores: 96 (192 virtual processor using HT)
 Hostname: wn030-wn035, wn040-wn045

INFINIBAND (2008):

 
Model: Supermicro SuperServer 6015TW-INF
Processor: 2 Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) Quad Core 2.3GHz
   Memory: 8 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 500GB
  Network: 2 Ethernet Gigabit + 1 Management
          OS: CentOS 5.4
      Nodes: 16
Total Cores: 128
 Hostname: wn010-wn025
 Infiniband switch of 24 ports

DEVELOPMENT (2004):

 
Model: Dell 
Processor: 2 Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
Memory   : 2 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 300GB
      Red: 2 Ethernet Gigabit
       OS: CentOS 5.4
    Nodos: 9
Total Cores: 18
 Hostname: wn001-wn009

NAS (Network-Attached Storage) (2010):

 
        Model: Supermicro
 Processor: 2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5520 (8M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 5.86 GT/s Intel® QPI)
    Memory: 24 GB RAM
 Hard Disk: 30x 2TB Hitachi SATA 3Gb/s + 45x 2TB Hitachi SATA 6Gb/s + 90x 2TB Toshiba SATA 6Gb/s
  Stor. Net: 2x LSI 3081E/R SAS HBA +  2x LSI 9200-8e SAS HBA
   Network: 10G + 2 Gigabit
            OS: OpenIndiana  oi_151a6
Filesystem: ZFS (deduplication, compression, etc.)
Raw Storage: 330TB

SERVICES (2008):

 
      Model: Supermicro
Processor: 2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5410 
   Memory: 24 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 24x1TB Seagate NS SATA
  Network: 2 Gigabit 
           OS: CentOS 5.4
Raw Storage: 24TB

BACKUPS (2005):

 
Model: Supermicro
Processor: 2x AMD Opteron 
   Memory: 4 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 16x1.5TB Seagate AS SATA
  Network: 2 Gigabit 
          OS: CentOS 5.4
Raw Storage: 24TB

XEN CLUSTER (2008):

 
Model: Supermicro
Processor: 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU  6420  @ 2.13GHz
   Memory: 2 GB RAM
Hard Disk: 2x500GB Seagate NS SATA
  Network: 2 Gigabit 
        OS: CentOS 5.4
   Nodes: 2