CITA occupies the 12th floor of the McLennan Physical Laboratories at the downtown campus of the University of Toronto. The centerpiece of CITA's high-performance computing (HPC) resources is a 528-CPU (2.4 GHz Xeons) Beowulf cluster installed in early 2003. The cluster uses an inexpensive and novel networking scheme based on gigabit ethernet in order to achieve 1.5 Teraflops and was ranked #38 in the world (#1 in Canada) on the June 2003 Top500 list, which is the highest ranking any academic computer in Canada has ever achieved. This system has been used primarily for simulations of cosmological structure formation, hydrodynamics, galaxy formation, planetary dynamics and CMB map analysis. The cluster was funded by a "Canadian Fund for Innovations" (CFI) grant to Peter Martin and is available to any CITA researcher whose research requires high performance parallel computing and/or large amounts of CPU time. An Itanium cluster with 8 quad-CPU machines, 512 GB of RAM and point-to-point gigabit connections was acquired with a CFI grant to Ue-Li Pen and is used to run an extremely fast and lightweight N-body code capable of evolving 6 billion particles for large cosmological This system is also available to other CITA researchers with large memory requirements. Several other multiprocessor systems are available including a Compaq GS320 with 32 alpha processors and 64GB of RAM as well as 4 quad-alpha ES40s (500 MHz processors and 4 GB of RAM apiece) and a quad ES45 with 1 GHz processors and 32GB of RAM. Significant amounts of diskspace are available including a 550GB SCSI Raid array, 3 TB of IDE disks on the ES45 and a 2TB raid array on the biggest cluster.
Every researcher at CITA has a desktop computer for general use and smaller computational tasks. These are all Intel and AMD-based personal computers running Linux. All of these systems are connected to each other and the Internet with 100 Mbit ethernet and can be used either individually or in parallel. The central fileserver is a Linux box with a 2 TB raid array which is connected to the HPC systems with gigabit ethernet. Researchers also have access to a number of peripheral devices, including a high-quality colour laser printer, a high-speed duplexing laser printer, an optical scanner, and various tape drives including a 16TB AIT-4 tape library.
[ Back to CITA Annual Report 2003 ]