HPC MSU

What is Maverick?

Maverick is the name of a "supercluster" computer system at the Mississippi State University HPC². A supercluster is a supercomputer-class computer system created by assembling a large number of small workstation or server-class systems into a single computing entity

We began research into clusters in 1987 and have written a brief history of our clustering research.

How big is it?

According to the Top500 Supercomputer Sites list published in June 2004, Maverick was the 158th fastest computer in the world, and the 16th fastest system at any academic site in the U.S. with a Linpack performance of 1.389 trillion floating point operations per second. Maverick is comprised of 192 IBM x335 nodes. Each node contains dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors and 2.5GB of RAM. The nodes are diskless.

Maverick uses the following networking components for inter-node communications.

  • 3 Voltaire ISR9600 96-port InfiniBand switches
  • 6 Extreme Networks Summit 200 48-port 100Mb/s ethernet switches with Gigabit ethernet uplinks.
  • 1 Cisco 4912 gigabit ethernet switch to connect the Extreme Summit 200's.

Installed software includes the RedHat Linux operating system, the Portable Batch System (PBS/Pro) for job scheduling, xCAT for systems management, and MPI/Pro and MVAPICH for parallel communications.

We've compiled some additional "Fun Facts" about Maverick.

What is it used for?

Maverick is used for such varied research interests as computational fluid dynamics, remote sensing, computational physics, and automotive research. Maverick is generally very heavily utilized.

What does it look like?

We have a gallery of photos available as well as a diagram that shows how the InfiniBand communications network is designed.

Maverick in the news

Maverick has been featured in several press releases and news stories.