The return of Hex
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. …
New HPC racks
Over the past few days the HPC and networks team relocated 3 racks worth of servers to a new location in the upper campus data center. This will free up space for the continuation of the refurbishment project. The end…
New GPU server
We have added another GPU server to our a100 partition. This server was purchased with funding from several groups as well as ICTS and additional resources will be dedicated to the shared a100free account. The server contains four a100-80GB cards…
Cluster migration
The HPC cluster has been moved to the new upper campus data centre. The new data centre provides more electrical power and cooling and also has a new UPS and generators in order to better withstand load shedding. In addition…
Data Centre migration
Dear colleagues, As part of the process of ongoing improvement, ICTS will be migrating the High-Performance Computing cluster from its current location to the new data centre. This will result in some downtime for the cluster. How does this affect…
HPC 2020 update
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…
Infiniband cabling
Thermal regulation and air flow are two important parts of any HPC installation. Adding Infiniband increases the amount of physical material at the back of the servers which can obstruct fans, reduce airflow and lead to overheating and damaged equipment. …
Infiniband Fabric
We’ve started installing and configuring the Infiniband connections before setting up BGFS storage. The fabric speed is 100Gb/s! …
HPC update
Following the move of Hex to Bremner we have continued installing the new HPC kit. A total of 4 Dell R740XD storage servers, 26 Dell 40 core C6420 compute nodes and 4 Dell C4140 GPU nodes with four P100 cards…
Hex cluster move
On Sunday the 16th of September Hex was moved from the Upper Campus data centre to the Bremner data centre. The move went smoothly and Hex was back up and running by Monday morning. There were some minor issues; the …