The Brazos Cluster at Texas A&M University

Brazos, the newest major computing cluster at Texas A&M University, is designed to meet the high-throughput computing needs of A&M's computational scientists and engineers. Though capable of executing modest MPI applications, Brazos is optimized for handling large numbers of single-node computations. This form of computing is referred to as high-throughput or capacity computing.

The computing power of Brazos comes from its (initially) 126 computing nodes, each a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with two quad-core Intel Xeon (Harpertown) processors running a 2.5GHz. 96 nodes have 16 GBytes RAM each, and 30 nodes have 32 GBytes each. Total peak performance is just over 10 teraflops.

Access to Brazos is via a login node, also a Dell server with two quad-core Xeons and 16 GBytes RAM. User home directories are supported on its 5 TByte file system.

Data storage is supported using NFS3 on a Dell server with 23 TBytes capacity. Campus access to this data storage is supported by an external file access gateway, another Dell server.

Operating software for Brazos includes the Linux operating system, GNU and Portland compilers, Maui/Torque/Gold cluster managers, several MPI and linear algebra packages, and numerous applications.

The compute nodes and servers of Brazos are connected internally via an Hewlett Packard switch, with Gigabit Ethernet connections to each compute node and 10GbE connections to the login node, the data fileserver, and the external file access gateway. The login node (with 1GbE) and the external file access gateway (with 10GbE) are connected to the campus network.

Funding for Brazos comes primarily from participating stakeholders, faculty from several (initially four) colleges. In addition to managing Brazos, the Academy itself also functions as a stakeholder. The initial stakeholders are:

• College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Jim Woolley of Entomology, Mariana Mateos of Wildlife Science, and Robert Washington-Allen of Ecosystem Science and Management
• Dwight Look College of Engineering, Akhil Datta-Gupta and Behnam Jafarpour of Petroleum Engineering, and Tiffani Williams of Computer Science
• College of Geosciences, John Nielsen-Gammon of Atmospheric Sciences
• College of Science, Jean-Luc Guermond, Wolfgang Bangerth, and Guido Kanschat of Mathematics

Additional funding from the Vice President for Research supports base infrastructure (e.g., racks and file servers). Support from CIS provides 10GbE networking to the campus network and other operational support such as machine room space, electrical power, and air conditioning. As new stakeholders join and as existing stakeholders increase their contributions, we expect the capacity of Brazos to grow.

Initial applications will include reservoir modeling, biomedical imaging, and atmospheric modeling. In addition to serving the needs of its stakeholders, some capacity on Brazos is expected to be available for other computational scientists and engineers at A&M.