Brutus cluster
Brutus is the central high-performance cluster of ETH Zurich. It was introduced to the public in May 2008. A new computing cluster called EULER has been announced and opened to the public in May 2014.
Processors
Brutus is a heterogeneous system containing 11 different kinds of compute nodes:;Standard nodes
- 120 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM
- 24 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM
- 410 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8380 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM
- 80 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM
- 6 nodes with four 8-core Intel Xeon E7-8837 CPUs and 1024 GB of RAM — NEW!
- 80 nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs and 256 GB of RAM
- 10 nodes with four quad-core AMD Opteron 8380 CPUs and 128 GB of RAM
- 18 nodes with two 12-core AMD Opteron 6174 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 2 Nvidia Fermi C2050 GPUs
- 2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and 6 Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPUs
- 2 nodes with two 6-core AMD Opteron 2435 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM and various Nvidia and AMD GPUs
- 256 nodes with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2220 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM
The peak performance of Brutus is slightly over 200 teraflops.
Networking
- All nodes are connected to the cluster's Gigabit Ethernet backbone
- All nodes are connected to a high-speed InfiniBand QDR network
Applications
Thanks to its heterogeneous nature, Brutus can tackle a wide range of applications:- Serial and embarrassingly parallel computations
- Distributed-memory computations
- Shared-memory, multithreaded applications up to 1024 GB of memory and/or 48 threads
- Third-party applications
Trivia
- Brutus was ranked the 88th fastest computer in the world in November 2009. Since then, its peak performance has increased three-fold.
- It was then the most energy efficient general purpose supercomputer in the world
- It successor, EULER, was ranked the 255th fastest computer in the world in June 2014