Dash User Guide: Technical Summary
Dash is a prototype for the large, 1024-node Gordon system. Dash is available to XSEDE users as a platform to understand the performance and optimization capabilities of using the features below for their codes
- Flash storage [also called solid state disk (SSD)] in the memory hierarchy for fast file I/O or memory swap space
- Virtual shared memory (vSMP) software from ScaleMP that aggregates memory across 16 nodes
Dash is currently deployed with two 16-node partitions—one with vSMP and one without. Additional nodes will be brought online over the coming months as part of ongoing acceptance activities.
Technical Summary
- 4 TB of flash memory configurable as fast file I/O subsystem or extended fast virtual memory swap space
- vSMP node with 768GB of memory; see the vSMP Node page for more information
- 64 compute nodes
- Two quad-core 2.4 GHz Intel Nehalem processors per node (512 compute cores)
- 48GB of DRAM per node (3 TB total DRAM)
- Peak performance of 4.9 teraflops
- 4 dedicated I/O nodes
- 7 TB total memory (DRAM+flash)
- InfiniBand DDR interconnect
Dash mounts the existing GPFS-WAN filesystem at SDSC. For more information and production dates, please visit the Dash User Guide on XSEDE.
