Computing

MARVIN

The current Marvin cluster is composed of different computing machines or nodes. Each of them has different characteristics because they have been incorporated over time. We have tried to keep all possible nodes in production to utilize the maximum computing power in the service. All of them have Infiniband interconnection. Below are the different nodes and their characteristics.

IBM Blade Center H22

The mr-03-XX nodes are the oldest machines currently in the cluster, dating back to 2012. They have 12 cores spread across two sockets with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz (Westmere)  and 96GB of gross RAM.

IBM System x3850 X5

The mr-04-XX node was the first 'Big Node' to be incorporated into the cluster in 2013. It has two sockets with 20 cores each, with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7-4850 @ 2.00GHz from the Westmere family. It has 256 GB of RAM.

Dell PowerEdge R430-730

 


The mr-00-XX nodes were incorporated between 2015-2018 through different purchases. They are two-socket machines with 16 and 32 cores with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz and Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 @ 2.10GHz from the Haswell and Broadwell families, respectively. They have 128 GB and 256 GB of gross memory.

Dell PowerEdge R830


The mr-01-XX nodes were the next 'Big Nodes' to be added to the cluster in 2017 and 2018. They have 4 sockets with 48 and 64 cores with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-4660 v4 @ 2.20GHz chips from the Haswell family. They have 512 GB of RAM.
 

SIE LADON-GIGABYTE

The latest 'Big Nodes' to be added to the cluster are the mr-05-XX nodes from 2020. They have two sockets and 48 cores of Intel® Xeon® Gold 6248R from the Skylake family. They have the most memory in the cluster, with 1.5TB of RAM each. In addition, they have an Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

 

Data Storage

MARVIN

The high-performance storage used by Marvin consists of 4 DELL PowerEdge 630 servers with 2 sockets and 32 cores each, using the E5-2630 v3 CPU. These servers are connected to 3 data cabinets through 12Gb SAS cables. The cabinets store the robbyfs filesystems (scratch and homes) and projects. Robbyfs has the particularity of storing data and metadata in different cabinets, which gives it more IO power.

DELL PowerEdge 630

DELL PowerVault MD3460, MD3460e

There is an MD3460 cabinet with 60 10TB SAS disks, with an MD3460e extension of 60 4TB SAS disks that provides the projects filesystem service. The other MD3460 cabinet and its MD3460e extension each have 60 4TB SAS disks that provide service for the robbyfs data (scratch and homes).

Dell Storage SCv2020, SC120

 

The SCv2020 cabinet and its SC120 extension provide the metadata service for the robbyfs filesystem (scratch and homes). They are composed of 36 480GB SSD disks.

 

MARVIN II

The storage for the new Marvin cluster (Marvin II) consists of an IBM ESS 3500 cabinet and a 4u102 extension. The set will provide 1 PB of filesystem data on SAS disks, with metadata on Flash disks. Additionally, two IBM Power L922 protocol nodes are incorporated for data export via NFS.

(More information coming soon).

IBM ESS 3500

IBM Storage Enclosure 4u102

IBM Power L922