Newsletter 7 (Jan 2015)
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to the first HPC newsletter in 2015.
We hope you had some time to relax over the holiday season. The year 2015 will become a very busy year with respect to High Performance Computing in Baden-Württemberg. The bwForCluster in Ulm is already up and running and the other three bwForClusters are likely to follow in the course of the year.
The HPC-Team wishes you a successful year 2015!
With best regards,
Your HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
Table of Contents
NEMO: Cluster resources ready for use
bwForCluster ENM: Preparing for Acquisition
NEMO: Cluster resources ready for use
If you need computational resources, please note that "NEMO" (our preliminary bwForCluster ENM) is available and ready for use. Currently we are running it in a "first come, first serve" governance model.
The new hardware will arrive only later this year. Therefore, we encourage you to run your applications already now on the preliminary cluster, in order to ensure a quick and smooth transition to the new hardware once it becomes available.
If you are a returning bwGRiD user, you already have all the necessary requirements. Just login via ssh to login.bwfor.uni-freiburg.de. Please note that you will start with an empty home directory.
For further details, please see http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de/nemo/access
NEMO: News and Updates
We have acquired 4 new infrastructure servers to accommodate the new cluster setup and provide a test node with a modern hardware configuration for benchmarking. The test machine is unsurprisingly called “test” and available directly from the login node (i.e. not managed by the scheduler). It has 128 GB memory and 2 Intel Haswell CPUs (with 8 cores each). If you want to use it, please give us an ahead notice.
With the new infrastructure servers, we can host many more virtual machines, albeit not yet managed on demand by the queuing system. There is work in progress to make this possible.
While we were migrating to the new server infrastructure, we also fixed a severe performance problem on the file server. As it turned out (and has been publicly reported) some SSD drives of the Samsung Evo brand end up with very low transfer rates after some time of usage. Applying the suggested firmware update fixed the problem in our case.
bwForCluster ENM: Preparing for Acquisition
We are still waiting for the DFG to finally approve our bwForCluster ENM application. Given the positive review that we received at the end of last year, it would seem likely that we will make it onto the agenda for the next DFG Joint Committee meeting at the end of March 2015.
Once we receive the final approval by the DFG, we would like to start the “Invitation to Tender” right away. To this end, we are already preparing the necessary legal documents and benchmarks. If you would like to influence the hardware configuration to suit your particular needs, your input in the form of application benchmarks is required now.
bwForCluster ENM: Application Benchmarks
As already mentioned in previous newsletters, we need application benchmarks from our scientific communities to tailor the hardware configuration of the forthcoming cluster to their needs. We have already received application benchmarks or feedback from the following people and groups:
- AG Prof. Markus Schumacher (Freiburg), Physics, HEPSpec
- AG Prof. Günther Quast (Karlsruhe): Physics, HEPSpec
- AG Prof. Gerhard Stock: (Freiburg): Physics, benchmark provided by Florian Still)
- AG Prof. Carsten Mehring (Freiburg): Neuroscience, Matlab benchmark provided by Dr. Tobias Pistohl
- AG Prof. Stefan Rotter (Freiburg): Neuroscience, NEST benchmark
Our thanks go to the aforementioned people for their feedback and continuing support.
If you think you or a member of your group can turn a typical use case in your work into a relevant application benchmark, please contact us as soon as possible.
bwGRiD: Final shutdown
The official shutdown date for the bwGRiD in Freiburg was on December 18th 2014. However, retrieving files was still possible until now. This grace period is now over.
HPC-Team Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de
bwHPC-C5
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de
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