The Norma computing cluster




New nodes have recently been added to the cluster. These are discussed here, here, here, here. and here





Norma is a stateless Beowulf-class computing cluster based on the Caos NSA GNU/Linux distribution. The cluster is located at the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics of Democritus University of Thrace at the city of Alexandroupolis, Greece, and first came into service on January 29th, 2009. A schematic diagram of the cluster, plus its description and the (unavoidable) screenshots follow.


Schematic diagram of the cluster

Norma comprises 40 CPU cores, 46 Gbytes of physical memory and 6 GPGPUs distributed over 10 nodes. The nodes are based on Intel's Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4 GHz quad processors and are connected via a dedicated HP ProCurve 1800-24G Gigabit ethernet switch. Each of the nine diskless (compute-only) nodes offers four cores, four Gbytes of physical memory and two (gigabit) network interfaces, with the exception of one node based on Intel's i7 965 extreme which offers six Gbytes of physical memory plus a CUDA-capable GTX-295 card. Of the eight Q6600-based nodes, four are equipped with an nvidia GTX-460 GPU. The head node comes with four cores, eight Gbytes of physical memory, 1.5 Tbytes of storage in the form of a RAID-5 array of four disks, three (gigabit) network interfaces, and an nvidia GTX-260 GPU. Norma is presently used almost exclusively for computational biology and crystallography projects of the structural and computational biology group.


For those that need some visual references, here are some screenshots:

Norma screenshots

Norma screenshot

For more information about the cluster specifics see the hardware and benchmarks pages. Visit the status page for current cluster activity (or otherwise).

about/intro.txt · Last modified: 2020/09/04 10:35 by glykos