TL;DR;
– The cluster head node operating system, firmware and storage system have all been patched\upgraded.
– The wall time for ada has been increased from 72 to 170 hours
– Matlab is now available on the cluster
Cluster update:
The head node and storage nodes have been updated to the latest version of Centos 7. In addition the firmware of these servers was also updated. The underlying storage service was upgraded to BeegFS 7.1.4 in conjunction with the storage clients on all the worker nodes. Over the next few weeks we will be updating the operating system and firmware on the worker nodes.
Wall times:
In December last year we published a survey asking researchers their opinions on wall times, number of jobs required, waiting and completion times etc.
The results have been published here. It is interesting to note that there seems to be an issue in understanding the correlation between an increase in wall time and the corresponding increase in queuing time that this results in as almost half of the researchers wanted their jobs to run for longer but did not want any delay after submission. Nevertheless we have increased the wall time of the ada queue from 72 hours to 170 hours. We will continue to monitor the queuing parameters over the course of the year and may adjust the queue time again in December. To summarize, your jobs can now run for longer but they will probably wait longer in the queue.
Matlab:
As part of the above-mentioned survey we also asked researchers if Matlab was required and if so which toolboxes were needed. Several researchers responded and as a result we have purchased a 10 seat concurrent license for the cluster along with the following toolboxes:
Bioinformatics Toolbox Computer Vision Toolbox Image Processing Toolbox Optimization Toolbox Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox