Obsidian Hardware Specifications
The Obsidian cluster uses the latest HPC Compute Blocks from Advanced Clustering Technologies. HPC Compute Blocks are built to support parallelized workflows with easy serviceability and high availability. You get high performance and density in the smallest form-factor board optimized for memory performance.
Each HPC Compute Block includes 4 computing nodes. With 7 HPC computing Blocks, obsidian has a total of 28 computing nodes. Each nodes has dual Intel 10-core E5-2640 v4 2.4GHz processors with 25 MB L3 cache, 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and 1 TB of hard drive.
The Obsidian cluster has a total of 560 cores, 1.78TB of RAM, and 21.50 TFLOPS of computing power. The head node of obsidian is housed in a 4U, 36-bay chassis with 216 TB of raw disk space. The actual usable storage space on the head node is 131 TB.
Obsidian nodes are connected via both InfiniBand FDR switch with 56Gb/s and 1Gb/s Ethernet switch. The InfiniBand connect features very high throughput and very low latency for message passing in high performance computing programs. In addition, IP over Infiniband (IPoIB) is also enabled for script based file transfer. The head node of obsidian has 10GbE Ethernet card that allows connection to ISU's Cisco network switch.