On the TeraGrid, what is Spur?
Spur (tg-login.spur.tacc.teragrid.org) is the Sun
visualization cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing
Center(TACC). Spur consists of eight nodes, each with significant
computing and graphics resources. Total system resources include 128
compute cores, 1TB of distributed memory, and 32 NVIDIA FX5600
graphics processing units (GPUs).
The login node is a Sun Fire X4600 server with eight dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 256GB of memory, and two NVIDIA Quadro Plex model 4 graphics cards. Compute nodes include:
- One Sun Fire X4400 server with four quad-core AMD Opteron
processors, 128GB of memory, and two NVIDIA Quadro Plex model 4
graphics cards
- Six Sun Fire x4400 servers, each with four quad-core AMD Opteron processors, 128GB of memory, and an NVIDIA Quadro Plex S4 graphics card
Spur shares the InfiniBand interconnect and Lustre Parallel file systems of Ranger (TACC), so Spur acts not only as a powerful, stand-alone visualization system, it also enables researchers to perform visualization tasks on Ranger-generated data without migrating to another file system, and to integrate simulation and rendering tasks on a single network fabric.
Spur is intended for serial and parallel visualization applications that take advantage of large per-node memory, multiple computing cores, and multiple graphics processors.
For more, see the Spur User Guide.
Note: This is a TeraGrid Roaming resource. See the TeraGrid User Support documentation for a dynamically generated list of all Roaming resources.
For further information about compute and visualization resources on the TeraGrid, see the Resource Catalog in the TeraGrid User Support documentation.
This document was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0503697 to the University of Chicago and subcontracted to Indiana University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
Last modified on May 13, 2009.







