The cluster dedicated to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data processing has been designed and built at IREA with the aim to optimize the performance depending on the particular type of application. The processing of radar data, in fact, requires considerable disk space usage and a large number of data access operations. The system has a high degree of scalability and redundancy and is therefore intrinsically resistant to the partial failure of its components.
The architecture, composed of 16 compute nodes, is based on AMD Opteron 64-bit processors, quad-core for a total of 128 processing units (cores) and 512 GB of RAM. Each processing node, on which has been installed the 64-bit version of the Linux operating system, is equipped with a unit disk in Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and RAID 5. The total available disk space is currently about 90 TB.