Newsletter 4 (Aug 2014)
Freiburg, August 14th, 2014
Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues!
After delivery of the bwForCluster-ENM application, we focus on the preparations and planning for the new cluster. This includes the reconstruction work of the IT-Services building to accommodate the new machine hall, the design of an operation scenario and the preparation for the invitation to tender. The bwGRiD has seen an upgrade so that it can serve as a test environment for the bwForCluster ENM setup.
In order to precisely estimate the requirements for the new cluster, finding suitable benchmarks would be very helpful. We may contact you and ask for your assistance in this matter.
We hope that you enjoy reading our newsletter. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Your HPC-Team at Freiburg IT-Services
Table of Contents
Planning and development of future operation scenarios
Storage Upgrade in the bwGRiD / Upgrade to CentOS 6.5
Help needed with clean-up of bwGRiD filesystem
bwUniCluster resource allocation and resource expiration
GridKA School "Big Data, Cloud Computing and Modern Programming"
8th International Parallel Tools Workshop
bwForCluster
“Inauguration” at IT-Services
The reconstruction of the IT-Services building has started: Some preparatory work is needed before the actual construction of the new machine hall in the basement of the IT-Services building can begin: On Monday, July 21st, some first construction work took place.
Throughout the whole procedure, hardware and corresponding services will need to be exchanged and relocated. As already mentioned in previous newsletters, this affects existing hardware in machine hall I. To guarantee smooth transitions, we offer migration paths by relocating hardware and by pointing users to the new bwUniCluster or to the still operational bwGRiD.
These steps are coordinated with all affected parties, e.g. BFG/Atlas or BCF. We aim for the inauguration of machine hall IIb by the end of the year. By that time, much of the currently installed hardware should have been relocated to machine hall IIa and machine hall IIb.
Machine hall I will become a zone of increased security, hosting critical services for university administration, key elements of our storage infrastructure and critical components of the university's network backbone. Until the end of 2015, as part of the reconstruction work, the old air conditioning system will get an energy-saving renovation.
Planning and development of future operation scenarios
In order to launch the new bwForCluster ENM as swift and smoothly as possible, we already started the planing and development of future operation scenarios. This is done step by step using the existing bwGRiD components. We aim at combining several objectives:
Continously provide HPC resources to bridge the transition from bwGRiD/BFG to bwForCluster ENM
Test the new operation system, evaluate the new resource manager and check new scheduling concepts
- Establish new resource monitoring strategies to improve efficiency; the plan is to acquire an Allinea (DDT+MAP) license
Promote the use of virtualization technology for offering tailored environments and improvements in workload capacity
To accomplish these goals, we are currently migrating to a new operating system (see next point). In order to be able to test and evaluate different configurations in a regular an timely fashion, we need to limit the runtime for individual jobs to 6 to 12 days. Furthermore, resources might be unavailable for a short time.
In parallel to this technical changes, we are getting in contact with the individual research groups. We would like to collect information and in particular suitable benchmarks that we might use for the invitation to tender.
Storage Upgrade in the bwGRiD / Upgrade to CentOS 6.5
The bwGRiD-Cluster received an upgrade in July. The operating system of the compute nodes is now CentOS 6.5. Additionally, we have upgraded 28 nodes (2 BladeCenters) to 32 GByte RAM capacity. Please visit http://www.bwgrid.uni-freiburg.de/hardware for the details. For technical reasons, the login-node (login.bwgrid.uni-freiburg.de) is still running Scientific Linux 5.5. Therefore, packages should not be build on the login nodes. Please use the interactive queue to build and test new packages:
qsub -I -q interactive -l nodes=1:ppn=8,walltime=2:00:00
Help needed with clean-up of bwGRiD filesystem
For testing the preliminary bwForCluster setup, we need room on the Lustre file system of the bwGRiD. We would therefore kindly ask you to check whether you have unused data which can be deleted. We might address some users directly via E-mail.
HPC Competence Center
Teaching and Training
On July 16th 2014, an introductory meeting was held at the IT services building regarding the use of available HPC resources. Slides and additional material can be found on this website. After an overview of the bwHPC concept, participants had the opportunity to make their first HPC experiments using the bwUniCluster at KIT in Karlsruhe. We will periodically offer more introductory courses. Additionally, we strive to integrate this introduction to HPC into existing courses, seminars or lectures related to the scientific fields covered by our HPC Competence Center.
New HPC Portal
We seized the opportunity and activated the unused domain www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de. Our intention is to turn this step by step into a starting point for all bwHPC activities at the University of Freiburg. We will gladly add prominent links to other HPC efforts and projects at the university.
Bookmark this page – in your browser or your mind – and visit it regularly.
HPC ENM Support Address
For future users of the bwForCluster ENM in Freiburg (Elementary Particle Physics, Neuroscience, Microsystems Engineering) the support E-mail address enm-support@hpc.uni-freiburg.de has been established. We have decided to employ our approved OTRS ticketing system for queries sent to this E-mail address.
New HPC-Newsletter management
The HPC-Newsletter is now part of a new mailing list related to HPC News. The list of recipients has been transferred, so if you have previously received HPC newsletters, you have been automatically subscribed to the new mailing list. We will also send announcements for upcoming events via this new mailinglist.
If you would like to get this newsletter by E-mail, we would kindly ask you to use your official, personalized E-mail address.
For subscription, please send an E-mail to hpc-news-subscribe@hpc.uni-freiburg.de
If you would like to unsubscribe, please send an E-mail to hpc-news-unsubscribe@hpc.uni-freiburg.de
Information
bwUniCluster resource allocation and resource expiration
Since January, the bwUniCluster in Karlsruhe is available for all members of the University of Freiburg. We have a 10% share in available resources. A workshop was held on July 16th in Freiburg to inform and instruct participants on how to access these resources.
In order to achieve both, a reasonable utilization of the bwUniCluster and a fair distribution of its resources, unused resources will expire after three months. Similarly, a maximum job runtime of six days has been currently established.
Events
GridKA School "Big Data, Cloud Computing and Modern Programming"
The International GridKa School is one of the leading summer schools for advanced computing techniques in Europe. The school provides a forum for scientists and technology leaders, experts and novices to facilitate knowledge sharing and information exchange. The target audience are different groups like grid and cloud newbies, advanced users as well as administrators, graduate and PhD students. GridKa School is hosted by Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It is organized by KIT and the HGF Alliance "Physics at the Terascale".
http://gridka-school.scc.kit.edu/2014
WHEN: 01/09/2014 to 05/09/2014
WHERE: Karlsruhe, Steinbuch Centre for Computing, KIT
bwHPC Symposium
The project bwHPC-C5 (www.bwhpc-c5.de) invites you to participate in the upcoming 1st bwHPC Symposium on October 1st, 2014 in Karlsruhe.
The events focuses on presentations of the progress of the bwHPC initiative, the activities and measures integrating scientific communties in the bwHPC infrastructure, as well as scientitific HPC projects and bwHPC-C5 successes.
http://indico.scc.kit.edu/indico/event/1-bwHPC-symposium
WHEN: 01.10.2014
WHERE: Karlsruhe, KIT Campus Süd, Building 30.10, NTI Hörsaal
8th International Parallel Tools Workshop
The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) is very pleased to host the 8th International Parallel Tools Workshop, which is jointly organized with the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing Dresden (ZIH). The Parallel Tools Workshop is an annual forum for providers of tools for debugging and performance tuning of parallel applications. The workshop serves a discussion forum between the developers of state-of-the-art tools used in high-performance computing, and allows for feedback and discussion on new challenges and techniques.
http://toolsworkshop.hlrs.de/2014
WHEN: 01.10.2014 – 02.10.2014
WHERE: HLRS, Allmandring 30, 70569 Stuttgart