29 April 2009
2009 Updates
Posted by brs under: Uncategorized .
We haven’t posted here in a while and I’d like to change the frequency of our updates to this blog. I guess its because I’m not very communicative (I suppose we need a PR person), but there’s been a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes these last few months.
“Large” Memory Sun Host
We recent acquired the host formerly known as “Sunblast”, a v890 with 16 UltraSPARC IV 1.3GHz CPUs and 64GB of RAM. We added this to the cluster in order to facilitate the execution of large memory, multi-threaded simulations using HFSS, ANSYS, and some other FEM and Multi-Physics applications. Currently, we’re testing with a few users over HFSS. The system had been under-utilized before, accepting logins and running XDMCP sessions for various users. Now that it is part of the grid and is properly managed by GridEngine, we can put this hardware to work doing what it was meant to. Hopefully, we’ll be able to add to or replace this system with some newer multi-core, multi-socket systems with even more RAM (on the order of 128GB or more). A general announement of availability should hit the Circe and Sunblast mailing lists within the next couple of days.
MSL Cluster
Dr. Ivan Oleynik of the Physics department just added 36 Dual-Quad Core Opteron 2384s with 16GB of RAM on InfiniBand with the help of a DoD grant. After ironing out some issues with the IB Verbs library and OpenMPI, we recompiled our OpenMPI libraries to support PSM (QLogic’s user-space IB driver interface) along with OpenIB and released the system for use today. Within a few weeks, those systems should be part of a low-priority queue where extra cycles can be utilized by other researchers.
Storage
After several months of testing and design, the new storage system has been brought online, providing 12TB of space for /home directories. The storage is clustered between two NFS servers which attach to two x4500s acting as backing stores. The x4500s are mirrored using ZFS to provide data redundancy and high-availability.
Networking
Our Force10 S50 switches have all been updated to the latest OS version, FTOS 7.8.1.0. This OS is based on FreeBSD and provides greater stability, performance, and features than the previous OS, SFTOS. We’ve also made necessary changes to our network configuration to allow for multiple uplinks to USF’s network for redundancy. The OS upgrade alone has helped to reduce issues with dropped packets and false positives that have been plaguing our monitoring system for quite some time.
Software
We’re planning updates to supported applications such as Matlab, Maple, Vasp, and others as well as the decomissioning of several older versions of these and other applications and libraries. These will be announced in the coming weeks.
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