February 9, 2008
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Since this blog has been very quiet for a while, I thought I'd give a general update on the HPC cluster.
Staffing Back in late July 2007, Dr. Jon Cline joined ITS as our first official HPC Cluster Administrator. Jon splits his time between ITS (50%) and the Biology department (50%). Jon was instrumental in our November conversion to new cluster software (Maui and Torque) and our deployment of new hardware at the same time (see below). Jon came on board with experience in managing HPC resources and in using them in research. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, an M.S. in Operations Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford.
Hardware As mentioned above, we deployed some new hardware in November 2007. Forty-four new compute nodes were funded by a research grant obtained by Dr. Robert Elston and matching funds provided by the Dean of the School of Medicine and by the Provost. Three new compute nodes were funded by Drs Peter Thomas, Steven Hauck, and Baowei Fei. ITS provided funding for four new compute nodes, a new master node, and an 11 Terabyte storage array. More recently, in February 2008, we also deployed an ITS-funded node with four dual-core processors and 32 GB of memory, intended for use with memory-intensive applications.
Software In November 2007 we also made significant changes in cluster software: we upgraded the underlying operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 with 64-bit capability, and we upgraded the job scheduling / resource management software to a combination of Maui and Torque. All applications were replaced with 64-bit versions.
As always, the best and most up to date information on the cluster can be obtained at http://wiki.case.edu/ITS/High_Performance_Computing_Cluster.
Posted by rab5 at 03:38 PM
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