About the HPC system Draco

The extension cluster DRACO of the HPC system was installed in May 2016 at the MPCDF with Intel 'Haswell' Xeon E5-2698 processors (~ 880 nodes with 32 cores @ 2.3 GHz each). 106 of the nodes are equipped with accelerator cards (2 x PNY GTX980 GPUs each).

Most of the compute nodes have a main memory of 128 GB, 4 nodes have 512 GB, 1 has 256 GB, 4 of the GPU nodes have a main memory of 256 GB.

In January 2017, the DRACO cluster was expanded by 64 Intel 'Broadwell' nodes that were purchased by the Fritz-Haber Institute. The 'Broadwell' nodes have 40 cores each and a main memory of 256 GB.

In total there are 30.688 cores with a main memory of 128 TB and a peak performance of 1.12 PetaFlop/s.

In addition to the compute nodes there are 4 login nodes and 8 I/O nodes that serve the 1.5 PetaByte of disk storage.

The common interconnect is a fast InfiniBand FDR14 network.

The compute nodes and GPU nodes are bundled into 30 domains.
Within one domain, the InfiniBand network topology is a 'fat tree' topology for high efficient communication. The InfiniBand connection between the domains is much weaker, so batch jobs are restricted to a single domain, that is 32 nodes.