New eResearch support member
This month we welcome Dr Jason van Rooyen who joins us from the European Molecular Biology Lab as an eResearch analyst to help us support and expand the capacity of UCT research groups with advanced computing needs.…
Changes to HPC
Our older cluster, hpc.uct.ac.za is undergoing several changes. The 200 series will soon be decomissioned. The nodes are old, have insufficient core density and are inefficient power-wise compared to more modern servers. The space in the racks is required for…
Computational hours and MPI issues
Our clusters are currently computing more active hours that were processed in the first two years in total. Today we exceeded 300,000 CPU hours of work, that's more than 34 computational years being processed currently.
There are several MPI…
There are several MPI…Quantum Espresso
For the chemistry users out there, we've installed Quantum Espresso, an integrated suite of Open-Source computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale. It is based on density-functional theory, plane waves, and pseudopotentials.
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…Dealing with the pbs_server qstat bug
Occasionally we need to restart the pbs_server daemon on our clusters to implement config changes, such as adding text tags in our previous post. There is a bugfeature in PBS such that after issuing a restart of pbs_server, CPU times…
Advance notification of downtime
Advance notification of downtime, June 2014:
Please be aware that the ICTS HPC clusters (Hex, Hpc and Grid) will be
shut down on the weekend of the 21-22 June 2014 for data center
maintenance. All jobs must be stopped or…
UCT eResearch Center and new team member
UCT's Senior Leadership Group has approved the formation of an eResearch Center. We will provide more news on this exciting development soon.
We would also like to welcome a new member to the ICTS eResearch team, Anelda van der Walt,
…Tower of power
Last month we took delivery of four new Dell C6145 servers with 64 cores and 128GB of RAM each. This effectively doubles our 600 series from 256 to 512 cores. Our dashboards have undergone a facelift over the last month
…Brief HPC Headnode Outage
This morning we expierenced a brief headnode outage. Two of the physical VM nodes lost sight of a specific data store on which the hex headnode resided. The nodes were restored within 15 minutes and the headnode brought back into…