NW-ICE
The Energy Smart Data Center (ESDC) testbed facility is located in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a U.S. Department of Energy national scientific user facility located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. The testbed occupies a separate approximately 700 square foot room adjacent to the Molecular Science Computing Facility (MSCF) High Performance Computing Center.
NW-ICE, the focus of the testbed, is an IBM System Cluster 1350 using SprayCool™ technology. The computational heart of the Cluster 1350 is the x3550 1u high performance computing rack drawer with dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5345 “Clovertown” processors implemented in 65nm process technology running the Linux SLES 10 operating system. Dual integrated Gigabit Ethernet controllers with TOC (TCP Offload Engine) and Jumbo Frame support with Cisco switches provide separate interconnects for data and management. Each of the 192 nodes has 16 GB (8x2 GB) of fully buffered DDR2 667 MHz DIMM memory with Chipkill™ ECC (Error Checking and Correcting) protection. Each node has two 160 GB local disks. The Intel Xeon E5345 is a 2.33 GHz quad-core processor has dual 4 MB L2 caches and is connected to the 1333 MHz front-side bus with a peak bandwidth of 21 GB/s. The E5345 is more energy efficient (80 W) than its faster 2.66 GHz cousin, the X5355 (120 W), i.e., 88% of the clock rate at 67% of the power. Both models use the same memory system, giving the E5345 a slightly higher bandwidth/flop ratio. With four floating-point operations per cycle, the eight-core nodes have a peak performance of nearly 75 Gigaflops per node and over 14.3 Teraflops for the entire eight-rack system and an High Performance Linpack (HPL) (Rmax) performance of 9.3 Teraflops. Five of the seven compute racks (one rack contains switches) are cooled using SprayCool modules that replace the normal processor heat sinks. Two of the racks have been left in their original air-cooled mode for comparison purposes.
Software includes Intel C, C++, and Fortran compilers and the Intel Math Kernel Library.
In June 2007 when NW-ICE was installed, it was listed at 101 in the 29th edition of the TOP500 list. NW-ICE is tied for 186th on the 30th edition released in November 2007 at SC07.
NW-ICE is listed at 61st on the Measured ranking of the Green500 List announced in November 2007 at SC07.