Facility
Colonial One is housed on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus in one of GW's two enterprise-class data centers and features the following:
- Professional IT management by the Division of IT, including 24-hour on-premise and remote environment monitoring with hourly staff walkthroughs
- Redundant power distribution, including UPS (battery) and generator backup
- Redundant cooling systems using a dedicated chilled water plant and a glycol refrigeration system.
- Direct network connectivity to GW's robust 100-Gigabit fiber optic network
Compute and Interconnect Capacity
Colonial One’s initial compute capacity features a total of 2,924 CPU cores and 1132,288 CUDA cores in the following compute node configurations:
- 64 standard CPU nodes featuring dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz 8-core processors with varying ranges of RAM capacity (64GB, 128GB, and 256GB nodes) and dual on-board solid state hard drives
- 79 CPU nodes featuring dual Intel Xeon E5-2650v2 2.6 GHz 8-core processors with 128 GB of RAM each
- 32 GPU nodes featuring dual Intel Xeon E-2620 2.0GHz 6-core processors with dual NVIDIA K20 GPUs and 128 GB of RAM
- 1 large-memory node featuring four Intel Xeon E7-8857v2 3.0 GHz 12-core processors with 2 TB of RAM
- FDR InfiniBand network interconnect featuring 54.5 Gbps total throughput, with 2:1 oversubscription per compute node.
Storage Systems
The Colonial One cluster has both a primary storage system and a high-speed scratch storage system connected to the Infiniband network fabric. Both are accessible throughout the entire cluster. Remote file transfer services are provided through dedicated login nodes. Additional specifications include:
- Dell NSS primary storage with 120 TB of usable capacity
- Dell/Terascala Lustre HSS high-speed scratch storage with 250 TB of usable capacity
Multi-Service Exchange (MSX)
MSX is a high performance virtual environment that provides virtual machines with direct access to a 100GB network infrastructure. It is integrated with the high performance high capacity cluster, Colonial One, located on the GW Virginia Science and Technology Campus (VSTC).
