"This cluster of HP ProLiant DL145 servers has significantly enhanced our capability to run high-performance message-passing parallel applications." – Chief Technology Officer Rob Simmonds, WestGrid

Executive summary:
WestGrid, the Western Canada Research Grid, is a $50 million collaborative project providing high-performance computing and multimedia/visualization resources to researchers and educators across Canada. WestGrid offers processing power ranging from serial to large-scale parallel computation. Researchers whose computing needs exceed the capabilities of their own research group or department are eligible to use WestGrid resources. The member institutions are Simon Fraser University, the Universities of Victoria, British Columbia, Northern British Columbia, The Banff Centre, Athabasca University, the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Lethbridge, Saskatchewan, Regina, Manitoba, Winnipeg and Brandon University. The computing resources are provided to academic researchers in a wide range of studies including drug design to treat illnesses, astrophysics experiments, and seismic modeling, all of which require compute-intensive calculations.

In October of 2005, WestGrid purchased a powerful new tool for the academic researchers in Canada. Called Matrix, this high-performance system is actually a cluster of 128 HP ProLiant DL145 servers each with two AMD Opteron 200 series processors. This configuration, known as the Cluster Platform 4000 configuration is housed at the University of Calgary and uses standards-based components and a modular buildingblock approach to provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure that is easy to implement and support.

Challenge:
Additional capacity for a wide range of high-performance simulations across a variety of fields of study.
The types of projects running on WestGrid systems include a wide spectrum of academic research. Examples of these include computational chemisty projects designing new drugs, material science projects creating polymers and astrophysics projects simulating the creation of new galaxies. Rob Simmonds, Chief Technology Officer at WestGrid discusses the IT environment.

• “The researchers are using a wide range of software applications.” “Much of the work performed involves large numerical simulations,” Simmonds said. There are many different forms of simulations using different specialized codes. The researchers are using a wide range of software programs: from commercial codes to public domain codes, to ones which are written by the research groups themselves.
• “WestGrid already had a cluster that handled message-passing applications, but demand for this type of system was increasing,” says Simmonds. WestGrid required a system with highperformance processors and a high-performance interconnect. These components allow communications between the compute nodes to happen in microseconds, making a significant difference in when a job is going to be complete.
• “WestGrid provides these computing resources at no charge to the researchers.” “It is critical to have these types of facilities to perform these kinds of research,” Simmonds said. WestGrid is funded by the Canadian federal government and from the provincial governments of Alberta and British Columbia; therefore, a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process had to be followed.

Solution and results: a powerhouse 256-processor cluster
The new Matrix system is a valuable tool for researchers in a variety of fields including physics, chemistry, the life sciences, and energy. The system features 128 HP ProLiant DL145 servers, each with dual AMD Opteron 200 series processors. A Voltaire Infiniband interconnect is used as the communications backplane and the HP Scalable File System is deployed across all nodes. “We had a need for a system which can achieve very high-performance message-passing for parallel computer programs,” said Simmonds. “This type of cluster, and Infiniband interconnect, fills that role very well.” HP Services completed installation quickly and most of the tools and services we required came with the system, leaving little for us to do to integrate it into our environment.”

• “One of our main reasons for selecting HP was that they provided a complete packaged solution for high-performance computing,” Simmonds said. “HP provides its own Linux software stack and libraries required for high-performance messagepassing and parallel computing.”
• “With 128 compute nodes doing high performance computing, you need to get a lot of data to and from the file servers quickly.” The HP Scalable File System provides very high-performance access to data. Typically high-performance storage, constructed in a large array, can consume a major portion of a budget. However, the HP ProLiant DL145 servers and the SATA drives are very affordable. When everything is configured properly the HP ProLiant servers deliver extraordinary performance.
• “The HP ProLiant DL145 servers with the dual AMD Opteron 200 series processors rate well in the high-performance world,” says Simmonds. There are two factors when considering processors: integer and floating point operations. When engaged in serious number crunching, which is what most high-performance computing is, the operations are usually very floating point intensive. Opteron processors rate very well on floating point types of calculations.
• “Another advantage offered by the HP ProLiant servers is favorable power consumption.” The wattage draw of AMD Opteron 200 series processors makes the HP ProLiant DL145 server an attractive option, said Dave Kinsella, an HP Solutions Architect who worked on the WestGrid project. “I think the wattage draw is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% lower than comparable processors,” Kinsella said. “Servers like the HP ProLiant DL145 are well suited for highperformance computing.”

About WestGrid:
WestGrid has approximately 1,000 users at various universities and research institutions across Canada, all accessing the broad array of resources at no cost. The major computing and storage sites are connected using dedicated network lightpaths provided by BCNet in British Columbia, Netera Alliance in Alberta and CANARIE across Canada. More information can be found at (http://www.westgrid.ca).

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