DaVinci — SGI Altix

DaVinci is an SGI Altix 350 server running the SGI ProPack 4 64-bit Linux operating system, based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9). Its main purpose is to provide visualization and data analysis capabilities to the NERSC user community. It is named after the famous Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci, due to its intended combination of visual imagery of technical information.

DaVinci is a unique resource among NERSC's collection of compute platforms. It consists of 32 Intel Itanium-2 processors with 192 GB of shared memory. While DaVinci is primarily intended to support NERSC's analytics program, its architecture is well-suited for OpenMP and threaded applications. Intel compilers provide high levels of optimization.

Another unique characteristic of DaVinci is its support of long-running interactive jobs. Other NERSC platforms provide interactive resources for the purpose of code development and debugging; DaVinci provides generous interactive access to assist researchers in analyzing their results from production runs on larger NERSC systems such as Franklin.

System Overview

DaVinci consists of 32 CPUs with 192 GBytes of shared memory. Each CPU is a 64-bit Intel Itanium-2 processor, running at 1.4 GHz, with a theoretical top speed of 5.6 GFlops/sec.