Pico

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Pico

Storage and processing of large volumes of data

PICO is named after Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Modena, humanist and philosopher of the 1400s, renowned for his prodigious memory.

It is intended to enable new “BigData” classes of applications, related to the management and processing of large quantities of data, coming both from simulations and experiments. Particular reference is put on all emerging scenarios as interactive model (Urgent Computing model), as well as new paradigms of resource utilization through “Cloud Computing” technology. The coexistence of virtualization technologies (cloud computing), orchestration technologies (access on demand) and high performance computing (Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems), completes the data-centric architecture of the HPC infrastracture of CINECA.

PICO is made of an Intel NeXtScale server, designed to optimize density and performance, driving a large data repository shared among all the HPC systems in CINECA.

The storage area is composed by high throughput disks (based on GSS technology) for a total amount of about 4 PB, connected with a large capacity tape library for a total actual amount of 12 PByte (expandible to 16 PByte).

The storage area is accessible from all HPC systems in CINECA (under the $DATA name) an is organised on the basis of projects. Each active project on any HPC system has a corresponding entry on $DATA.

The storage area is a “multi-level” memory. Depending on the defined policy, data migrate automatically on the tape, in a transparent way with respect to the user.

Model:  IBM NeXtScale

Total Nodes  CPU Cores per Nodes Memory (RAM) Notes
Compute/login  node 66 Intel Xeon E5 2670 v2 @2.5Ghz 20 128 GB
Visualization node 2 Intel Xeon E5 2670 v2 @ 2.5Ghz 20 128 GB 2 GPU Nvidia K40
Big Mem node 2 Intel Xeon E5 2650 v2 @ 2.6 Ghz 16 512 GB 1 GPU Nvidia K20
BigInsight node 4 Intel Xeon E5 2650 v2 @ 2.6 Ghz 16 64 GB 32TB of local disk

Software

GCC
Adf
Gsl
IDL
NAG
R
Qt
PGI
VMD
JRE
GNU
NCO
MKL
Bwa
GMP
Git
GTS
QE
NCL
JDK
SU2
Sra
Gmt
Fsl
Cdo
Nbo
Vep
Ams