stic.rice.edu

STIC stands for Shared Tightly-Integrated Cluster. As opposed to a loosely integrated “farm” (like Sugar), a tightly-integrated parallel cluster is designed to run large multi-node jobs over a fast interconnect. STIC consists of 170 Appro Greenblade E5530 nodes each with two quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon (Nahalem) CPUs as well as 44 Appro Greenblade E5650 nodes with two six-core 2.6GHz Intel Xeon Westmere CPUs. This gives the system a total of 1920 compute cores. There is a maximum of 720 compute cores available to all users and is subject to change due to special projects, maintenance tasks, and so on. The remaining cores are part of a Research Computing Resort Condominium. Each node has 12GB of memory per node shared by all cores on the node.  The system also has three file systems.  An 11 TB Panasas volume ($SHARED_SCRATCH) provides fast I/O to run user applications while an NFS server provides 1 TB for home directories ($HOME) and another 2 TB for group-based allocation ($PROJECTS).  The inter-node message passing fabric is DDR Infiniband.

NSF Citation

If you use STIC to support your research activities, please cite the National Science Foundation grant that was used for the procurement of this system. An example citation follows:

This work was supported in part by the Cyberinfrastructure for Computational Research funded by NSF under Grant CNS-0821727.