A HIGH PERFORMANCE CLUSTER FOR ASTRONOMICAL COMPUTATIONS

Abstract

A high performance computing cluster for astronomical computations has been built at Korea Astronomy Observatory. The 64 node cluster interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet is composed of 128 Intel Xeon processors, 160 GB memory, 6 TB global storage space, and an LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape library. The cluster was installed and has been managed with the Open Source Cluster Application Resource (OSCAR) framework. Its performance for parallel computations was measured with a three-dimensional hydrodynamic code and showed quite a good scalability as the number of computational cells increases. The cluster has already been utilized for several computational research projects, some of which resulted in a few publications, even though its full operation time is less than one year. As a major resource of the testbed, the cluster has been used for Grid computations, too.