Welcome to the NEMO web site

Nemo is a large beowulf-class parallel computer, built and operated by the LSC group at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM). It become operational in the first quarter of 2006 and is used for development work and production data analysis for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Nemo is used by members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and also serves as a resource for the GriPhyN collaboration.

This web site contains documentation for LSC members about how to use NEMO, and how NEMO will work. On the left-hand side of this page are a set of links which you can follow to get additional information about NEMO. There will also a search tool which you'll be able to use to find relevant web pages.

• NEMO is a 780-node (1560 core) linux beowulf cluster with a Gb/s ethernet interlink.
• NEMO was funded on July 20, 2004 by a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by matching funds from UWM.  It's anticipated lifetime is three years or more.
• The total cost is $1,891,065.  This is funded as follows: $1,444,972 (NSF) + $446,093 (UWM). UWM is also providing new cluster room space.
• The construction schedule was
• June 2005-November 2005: Benchmarking & Testing.
• December 2005: Purchase order issued.
• January 2006: First rack delivery (32 nodes).
• February 2006: 19 racks delivery (748 nodes).
• March 2006: Storage server delivery (300 TB).
• Q1 2006: Commissioning.
• NEMO baseline design highlights:
• 780 nodes, each having 8.8 Gflop peak performance. Each node has one AMD Opteron 175 dual-core CPU and an 80GB SATA disk.
• 2 Gbytes of RAM per box, or a total of about 1.6 TB of RAM.
• 300 usable Terabytes of inexpensive (SATA-II) distributed disk attached to hardware RAID controllers. These will be in separate storage servers attached to the network
• The system is networked with a Force10 E1200 ethernet switch. This is oversubscribed by using edge switches to feed the nodes. A switching design is linked from the left hand column on this page.
• All equipment is connected to a 500kVA/400 kW UPS system. This is a Powerware 9315 with three battery cabinets (6 minutes runtime at full load).
• The dedicated cluster room has approximately 1400 square feet of usable floor space, an 18-inch raised floor, and four Data-Aire 26-ton air conditioning units. Heat is transfered to a water/glycol mixture, which is circulated to dry coolers on the roof.