Over the last week ICTS engineers have been adding 5 new BL460 blades to the cluster. The OS install took place on Tuesday, applications on Wednesday and our first user is already running jobs on the CPUs.
The 400 series have two 6 core Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs and 24GB of RAM each. This increases our available core count from 40 to 100 cores. We will hopefully also be extending the 200 series over the next few weeks as upgrades take place in our data center. We have also increased the queue size accordingly to allow more jobs to run simultaneously.
The new servers also mount the /home NFS and hence can accomodate parallel MPI jobs. However the version of mpicc on the 400 series differs from that on the 200 and 300 series, hence it is non-trivial to spread jobs across the entire cluster. Later in the year we will embark on an OS and application streamlining project to bring all the versions up to date.
The 400 series have two 6 core Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs and 24GB of RAM each. This increases our available core count from 40 to 100 cores. We will hopefully also be extending the 200 series over the next few weeks as upgrades take place in our data center. We have also increased the queue size accordingly to allow more jobs to run simultaneously.
The new servers also mount the /home NFS and hence can accomodate parallel MPI jobs. However the version of mpicc on the 400 series differs from that on the 200 and 300 series, hence it is non-trivial to spread jobs across the entire cluster. Later in the year we will embark on an OS and application streamlining project to bring all the versions up to date.