The Brazos Cluster at Texas A&M University

Brazos, a 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 172 computing nodes, each with two quad core Intel Xeon (Harpertown) or AMD Opteron (Shanghai) processors running at 2.5GHz with 16 to 32GB per node. Total peak performance is about 13.8 TFlops. When combined with the 128 node Infiniband fabric high-performance IAMCS Hurr cluster, there are a total of 300 nodes, 2400 cores, over 8TB of memory and a peak performances of 24 TFlops.

Access to Brazos is via a login node, also a Dell server with two quad-core Xeons and 32GB RAM. User home directories are supported on its 5TB file system. Data storage is supported using NFS3 on a Dell server with 26TB capacity and using GlusterFS on a 108TB storage array runing on three Scalabale Informatics JackRabbit 4's. 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 a Hewlett Packard switch, with Gigabit Ethernet connections to each compute node and 10GbE connections to the login node and the data fileserver. The login node is connected to the campus network with 10GbE. The networking fabric of the IAMCS Hurr cluster is DDR Infiniband.

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.

Funding sources include: the National Science Foundation, including awards CBET-0736202, DEB-0730616, and DMS-0922866; the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; Texas A&M University, including the Office of the Vice President for Research, Computer Access Fees, and faculty from the Colleges of Science, Agriculture and Life Sciences, Engineering, and Geosciences; Texas AgriLife Research; and Texas Engineering Experiment Station.