Head node reboot
This weekend the head node suffered an unexpected reboot. We're still not sure what the cause of this was. However it looks as if the running jobs were not effected.…
Honours course assistance
The ICTS HPC cluster was used as a teaching and demonstration system for the computer science honours course in Desktop High-Performance Computing. The course coverd comparative parallel programming languages for multicore and accelerator architectures.…
Large memory machine
We have installed a new C class blade with 64GB of RAM to try and address (excuse the pun) a memory space issue one of our users is having. It's a HP BL460 G7 with dual 6 core 2.8GHz CPUs…
Bioconductor and R
We updated our version of R to 2.15.0. Additionally we installed the Bioconductor package which provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data. Bioconductor uses the R statistical programming language, and is open source and open
…New worker nodes
We added two new servers to the 400M series today. This brings our CPU complement up to 176 cores. Next week we hope to add another server to this series, however this one will have double the RAM (64GB) and …
HPC Honours Course at UCT
UCT Computer Science are offering an honours course in Desktop High-Performance Computing: comparative parallel programming languages for multicore and accelerator architectures. This course is open to non-CS and non-UCT people and will run in Room 303 of the CS Building
…BackBlaze test
We've started to test the new BackBlaze disk unit. It's presenting an iSCSI mount but we don't have sufficient switch ports to wire up all our worker nodes. As a compromise we've made the iSCSI mount available to nodes 408…
Longest job to date
Today one of our users ran the longest job our cluster has hosted so far: 10,780km, submitted from the campus of the Australian National University. ;-)
Plans for 2012
Firstly a big thanks to all those who made use of our infrastructure last year, we accumulated over 114,000 CPU hours and increased our core count from 24 to 150. Our plans for 2012 is to grow this resource and
…New servers
Our VMware infrastructure is being upgraded so we got some hand-me-downs. 2 x BL460 servers with 8 cores and 32GB of RAM each. These have been added to the 400M series. This brings our HPC cluster up to just over…