Iris Timeline¶

This page records a brief timeline of significant events and user environment changes on Iris. The Iris cluster exists since the beginning of 2017 as the flagship HPC supercomputer within the University of Luxembourg until 2020 and the release of the Aion supercomputer.

2016¶

September 2016¶

Official Public release of Iris cluster tenders on TED European tender and Portail des Marchés Publiques (PMP)
- RFP 160019: High Performance Storage System for the High Performance Computing Facility of the University of Luxembourg.
- RFP 160020: High Performance Computing Facility (incl. Interconnect) for the University of Luxembourg.

October 2016¶

Bids Opening for both RFPs on October 12, 2016.
- Starting offers analysis by the ULHPC team, together with the procurement and legal departments of the University

November 2016¶

Awarding notification to the vendors
- RFP 160019 attributed to the Telindus/HPE/DDN consortium to provide High Performance Storage solution of capacity 1.44 PB (raw) (over GPFS/SpectrumScale Filesystem), with a RW performance above 10GB/s
- RFP 160020 attributed to the Post/DELL consortium to provide a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster of effective capacity $R_\text{max}$ = 94.08 TFlops (raw capacity $R_\text{peak}$ = 107.52 TFlops)

2017¶

March-April 2017¶

Delivery and installation of the iris cluster composed of:

iris-[1-100], Dell PowerEdge C6320, 100 nodes, 2800 cores, 12.8 TB RAM
10/40GB Ethernet network, high-speed Infiniband EDR 100Gb/s interconnect
SpectrumScale (GPFS) core storage, 1.44 PB
Redundant / load-balanced services with:
- 2x adminfront servers (cluster management)
- 2x access servers (user frontend)

May-June 2017¶

End of cluster validation
8 new regular nodes added
- iris-[101-108], Dell PowerEdge C6320, 8 nodes, 224 cores, 1.024 TB RAM
Official release of the iris cluster for production on June 12, 2017 at the occasion of the UL HPC Scool 2017.

October 2017¶

Official Public release of Iris Lustre Storage acquisition tenders on TED European tender and Portail des Marchés Publiques (PMP)
- RFP 170035: Complementary Lustre High Performance Storage System for the High Performance Computing Facility of the University of Luxembourg.

November 2017¶

Bids Opening for Lustre RFP on November 28, 2017.
- Starting offers analysis by the ULHPC team, together with the procurement and legal departments of the University

December 2017¶

Awarding notification to the vendors
- Lustre RFP 170035 attributed to the Fujitsu/DDN consortium to provide High Performance Storage solution of capacity 1.28 PB (raw)
60 new regular nodes added yet based on Skylake processors
- iris-[109-168], Dell PowerEdge C6420, 60 nodes, 1680 cores, 7.68 TB RAM

2018¶

February 2018¶

iris cluster moved from CDC S-01 to CDC S-02

April 2018¶

SpectrumScale (GPFS) DDN GridScaler extension to reach 2284TB raw capacity
- new expansion unit and provisioning of enough complementary disks to feed the system.
Delivery and installation of the complementary Lustre storage, with 1280 TB raw capacity

July 2018¶

Official Public release of tenders on TED European tender and Portail des Marchés Publiques (PMP)
- RFP 180027: Complementary Multi-GPU and Large-Memory Computer Nodes for the High Performance Computing Facility of the University of Luxembourg.

September 2018¶

Bids Opening for Multi-GPU and Large-Memory nodes RFP on September 10, 2018.
- Starting offers analysis by the ULHPC team, together with the procurement and legal departments of the University

October 2018¶

Awarding notification to the vendors
- RFP 180027 attributed to the Dimension Data/Dell consortium

Dec 2018¶

New Multi-GPU and Bigmem compute nodes added
- iris-[169-186]: Dell C4140, 18 GPU nodes x 4 Nvidia V100 SXM2 16GB, part of the gpu partition
- iris-[187-190]: Dell R840, 4 Bigmem nodes 4x28c i.e. 112 cores per node, part of the bigmem partition

2019¶

May 2019¶

6 new Multi-GPU nodes added
- iris-[191-196]: Dell C4140, 6 GPU nodes x 4 Nvidia V100 SXM2 32GB, part of the gpu partition

October 2019¶

SpectrumScale (GPFS) extension to allow 1Bn files capacity
- replacement of 2 data pools (HDD-based) with new metadata pools (SSD-based)

Last update: May 6, 2024