Machine Specifications - Round 2

Machine specifications for second round purchase

Discussion on this page is public so please avoid any comments that would bring the department into disrepute.

Storage for experimental data

Some fibre-channel/NFS provision Looking at 1PB storage in total. Looking for a system where this could at least be doubled if necessary. Want NFS access to the files ideally.

Networking requirements

What networking kit is needed here?
- Multi 10G NICs (2-port can be Gen.2, 4 port must be Gen.3 or x16)
- Several 40G NICs (must be Gen.3, if 2-port needs to be x16)
- Optical switch (e.g. Polatis, Glimmerglass, ideally 192x192...)
- fibres and direct attach cables for the amount of NICs

Networking machines

- Support full PCIe size cards
- PCIe Gen. 3, multiple slots of x16 or x8 - At least 2 slots which are 2-slot-wide and 2 slots that are 1-slot-wide
- Haswell CPU or higher
- 2 sockets (but only few machines fully populated) - >3GHz freq
See evaluation report here: link

Additional requirements (to be tested before purchase):
- Be able to drive 100G adapter cards (support bifurcation)
- Be able to drive 4 x 40G (2 x 2 x 40G or 4 x 1 x 40G), to 2 processing sockets (to be tested using two 80G Solarflare cards)

Large memory machine

Single threaded computing

Storage experiments

Attached fast storage devices such as PCI card memory

Storage machine

Storage server(s) that are used for experimentations (i.e. not to store experimentation results, but for dev & test)

Multi-core machines

320 core machines
"simple" multi-socket 8+ core machines

GPU

NL groups interested in this - will it fit in the above?