LLNL teams with computing industry leaders to develop an advanced technology cluster testbed

Important technologies for scaling up computing clusters include Open Fabrics Enterprise Edition (OFED) InfiniBand™ Open Source software; Lustre Open Source Parallel File System; and Open Source Operating System Software and cluster tools used by the Tri-Lab Capacity Clusters, which serve researchers at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national labs. In addition, Hyperion will help lay the foundation for future petascale ASC computing platforms by facilitating the development of processors, memory, networks, storage and visualization.

The first half of Hyperion is now online and being used by the collaboration. When completed in March 2009, the Hyperion cluster, located at Livermore, will have at least 1,152 nodes with 9,216 cores; with about a 100 teraFLOP/s peak; more than 9 TB of memory; InfiniBand™ 4x DDR interconnect and access to more than 47 GB/s of RAID disk bandwidth. The Hyperion testbed includes two Storage Area Networks (SAN): one based on "Data Center Ethernet" and the other based on InfiniBand™. Both SANs are currently deployed utilizing a unique TorMesh topology. This system is the largest testbed of its kind in the world and will provide the Hyperion collaborators with an unmatched opportunity to develop and test hardware and software technologies at unprecedented scale.

Hyperion helps fulfill U.S. Department of Energy/NNSA goals to provide state-of-the-art computing capabilities for national security; advance high-performance scientific computing for meeting energy, climate and other national challenges; enabling scientific discovery in basic science; and enhancing U.S. competitiveness in high performance computing.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://www.llnl.gov) is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.