Daily Image
24-07-2015
DRAGNET GPU Cluster Delivered
| Submitter: | The DRAGNET Team |
| Description: | After a half-year design and tender process, the DRAGNET GPU cluster has now been installed by ClusterVision at the Smitsborg Rekenhal in Groningen... only an arm's length away from LOFAR's COBALT correlator, which will feed DRAGNET with data at a rate of 50-200 Gb/s. DRAGNET features 23 worker nodes, which together house 92 state-of-the-art Titan X GPUs (each 2U node is packed with 4 Titan X's!). These consumer-grade GPUs are both cheap and powerful, each providing also 12GB of RAM, which is crucial for correcting for dispersive delay at LOFAR's low frequencies. The massive cumulative compute power of the DRAGNET cluster (~600 TFlops) will be used for pulsar and fast transient searches. In some observing configurations, we aim to search the data in real time, in order to enable a higher on-sky time through commensal observations and in order to trigger on interesting astrophysical events. Ultimately, we want to handle 100 tied-array beams for real-time single-pulse searches. This already puts DRAGNET within a factor of a few of what will be needed for similar science with SKA-Low! Commissioning of the cluster is underway, with significant help from Mike Sipior. Many thanks also to Arjen Koers and Teun Grit for their help with the network connections. The DRAGNET cluster is funded through a Starting Grant from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement nr. 337062 (PI Hessels). |
| Copyright: | Bassa/Sipior |
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