On the TeraGrid, what is Frost?

On the TeraGrid, Frost (tg-login-frost.ncar.teragrid.org) is the Blue Gene/L system at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Frost is a highly scalable platform for developing, testing, and running parallel MPI applications on up to 2,048 processors, and providing efficient computing for smaller job sizes.

Frost is a single-rack system with 1,024 compute nodes running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. There is one I/O node for every 32 compute nodes for a total of 32 I/O nodes in the rack. Each compute node and I/O node is a dual-core chip, containing two 700MHz PowerPC-440 CPUs, 512MB of memory, and two floating-point units (FPUs) per core. Frost has a total of 2,048 processors capable of sustaining a peak performance of 5.734 teraflops. By default, the compute nodes run in co-processor mode (i.e., one processor handles computation and the other handles communication). In virtual-node mode, both processors on a node are available to run user code, but they share the computation and communication load. A total of 6TB of disk space is available.

For more, see the NCAR Frost user guide.

As part of the transition to TeraGrid XD, this resource will be decommissioned in the near future. For decommission dates of retiring TeraGrid systems, see the XD Transition page on the TeraGrid web site.

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.

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