Our new cluster is now live. The head node is hex.uct.ac.za, for those that remember our rollout of Dell C6145’s in 2013.
At present the cluster consists of 16 C6620 nodes with 48 cores and 384GB of RAM each. By default all new accounts are now being created on this cluster with the exception of those accounts requiring GPU access. In order to have your existing hpc account migrated to hex please email the admins. However there are currently no GPU servers attached to hex. [spoiler: brand new GPUs coming soon.]
The new cluster is running a much more up-to-date version of SLURM. It makes use of a 130TB PURE array for storage. While this is fairly small and limits /scratch storage currently, our plan is to move the older BGFS storage to hex once all hpc accounts are migrated. Authentication to the hex is via your UCT email credentials which will make use of the cluster a bit more seamless. We are also rolling out a ‘graphical’ web based interface to the cluster for applications that make use of X11.
Once the older hpc cluster is decommissioned those nodes will also move across to hex to provide additional high memory and long period job queues.