Brutus cluster

Brutus is the central high-performance cluster of ETH Zurich. It was introduced to the public in May 2008. A new computing cluster called EULER has been announced and opened to the public in May 2014.^[1]

Processors

Brutus is a heterogeneous system containing 11 different kinds of compute nodes:

Standard nodes

120 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM (5760 cores)
24 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (576 cores)
410 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8380 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (6560 cores)
80 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM (1280 cores)

Large-memory (fat) nodes

6 nodes with four 8-core Intel Xeon E7-8837 CPUs and 1024 GB of RAM (192 cores) — NEW!
80 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (3840 cores)
10 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8380 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM (160 cores)

GPU nodes

18 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 2 Nvidia Fermi C2050 GPUs (432 cores + 36 GPUs)
2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 6 Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPUs (24 cores + 12 GPUs)
2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and various Nvidia and AMD GPUs (24 cores + 2 GPUs)

Legacy nodes

256 nodes with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2220 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM (1024 cores)

In total Brutus contains 19,872 cores, plus a few hundreds in the cluster's file servers, login nodes and management nodes.

The peak performance of Brutus is slightly over 200 teraflops (200 × 10¹² floating-point operations per second).

Networking

All nodes are connected to the cluster's Gigabit Ethernet backbone
All nodes (except those with Opteron 2220 CPUs) are connected to a high-speed InfiniBand QDR network

Applications

Thanks to its heterogeneous nature, Brutus can tackle a wide range of applications:

Serial and embarrassingly parallel computations
Distributed-memory computations (MPI using MVAPICH2)
Shared-memory, multithreaded applications (OpenMP) up to 1024 GB of memory and/or 48 threads
Third-party (commercial) applications

Trivia

Brutus was ranked the 88th fastest computer in the world in November 2009 (top500.org). Since then, its peak performance has increased three-fold (from 65 to 200 TF).
It was then the most energy efficient general purpose supercomputer in the world (Heise.de)
It successor, EULER, was ranked the 255th fastest computer in the world in June 2014 ^[2]

External links

Official Brutus page at ETH Zurich: http://www.cluster.ethz.ch/index_EN
Picture gallery: http://www.gallery.ethz.ch/brutus^{[permanent dead link‍]}
Article in ETH Life, the on-line journal of ETH Zurich
Brutus wiki: http://brutuswiki.ethz.ch^{[permanent dead link‍]} (access restricted to members of ETH)

References

[1] "The new HPC cluster Euler now ready – ID-Blog".

[2] "Euler on position 255 – ID-Blog".

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