Technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently installed Wolf, a high-performance supercomputer from Cray Inc., Seattle. It uses 616 compute nodes, each with two eight-core 2.6-GHz Intel “Sandybridge” processors, 64 Gbytes of memory, and a high-speed Infiniband interconnect network. It also has the Lab’s Panasas parallel file system, as well as a new one based on Lustre, a parallel distributed-file system used for large-scale cluster computing.
The supercomputer operates at 197 teraflops/sec. Collectively, it houses 9,856 compute cores and 19.7 terabytes of memory. It will give users working on unclassified projects access to 86.3 million central processing unit core hours/yr. Wolf will initially be working on modeling the climate, materials, and astrophysical bodies and system.