La facility per il calcolo ad alte prestazioni SCAN

SISTEMA DI CALCOLO PER L’ASTROFISICA NUMERICA (SCAN)

As the demand for calculation resources increased in 2000, the OAPa reasearchers launched the SCAN service (Sistema di Calcolo per l’Astrofisica Numerica; Computing System for Numerical Astrophysics). At the present day the facility consists of two clusters Linux: one (SPHINX) based on six nodes each with 8-cores and two nodes each with 12 cores, for a total of 72 CPUs and 144 GByte of memory RAM, hosted in four Twin Servers; the second cluster (CORVUS) is based on a single node with 64-cores and 128 GByte of memory RAM. The 64 bit nodes are based on processors Intel (Xeon Harpertown E5420, 2.5 GHz) and AMD (Opteron Barcelona 2354, 2.2 GHz). All the nodes are equipped with Infiniband (Host Channel Adapter – HCA) and are interconnected through the highly efficient switch InfiniBand (Mellanox Infiniscale III DDR).

Personnel
Morale Flavio Technician INAF/OAPa
Orlando Salvatore Researcher Astronomer INAF/OAPa
Peres Giovanni Full Professor University of Palermo
Reale Fabio Associate Professor University of Palermo
Speziale Salvatore Technician INAF/OAPa

THE COMETA CONSORTIUM AND THE PI2S2 PROJECT
In 2005, INAF through its institutes based in Sicily (OAPa, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania, and Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica di Palermo) promoted the foundation of the COMETA Consortium and outlined the PI2S2 Project, as part of the key national project ‘Research, High Training and Technologic Development’ funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and University. Other partners, besides INAF, are: INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics); INGV (National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology); the Universities of Palermo, Messina and Catania, and the SCIRE Consortium. The PI2S2 Project allowed the creation of an e-infrastructure in Sicily based on the GRID paradigm which can be used by researchers from OAPa. In particular, research and development centres have been built in order to carry out very important activities in the field of major research and technological applications. The centres are equipped with HPC processors, new managing and processing systems for large databases, new distributed computing technologies and new systems oriented to multimedia simulations.

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