2007 Picasso and Pablo supercomputer
The year 2007 supossed a great improvement for UMA supercomputing facilities. A new building dedicated to excellence in research was finished, and all supercomputing equipment was moved there. It counts with two DataCenter rooms, one for high performance machines, and the other one for equipment with less cooling requirements, like tape libraries.
At this time, there were three different architectures inside the same room.
HP Superdome with 128 cores and 400 Gbytes of shared memory.
Two racks were used to hold only cpus, memory, and all interconnection cables necessary to reach all the shared memory from any compute core. A third rack was used for operating system and additional scratch storage.
Program parallelization in this kind of supercomputers (shared memory ones), is usually easier than on a cluster, since it appears as a single computer to end users.
PowerPC 970 cluster with 512 cores and 1 TB of RAM.
Pablo is a cluster with 512 POWER970 microprocessors and 1TB of RAM. It is composed by 256 blades equipped with two POWER cpus and 4 GB of RAM.
This cluster belongs to the RES (Red Española de Supercomputación - Spanish Supercomputing Network), and its time is shared between RES users and University of Málaga.Three racks are used to host all blades, and another one for administration servers and storage infrastructure.
All blades are interconnected by Mirynet, a fast and with a very low latency network very suitable for clusters.
x86 Cluster
There was available a x86 cluster with 80 cores and 160GB of RAM, composed by 10 blades with two Xeon quadcore processors (8 cores per blade) and 16 GB of RAM.
These blades are interconnected by an InfiniBand network which provides a very high intercommunication speed that improves parallel processes.
This cluster is still in use for backend support.
Storage
