New ICTS HPC cluster
Installed and configured a new cluster, srvslnhpc001. The head node is a HP BL20P blade with 2 dual core 3.6GHz CPUs and 8GB RAM. The 3 worker nodes are BL20P blades with 2 dual core 3.6GHz CPUs and 4GB RAM…
Sharing resources with Grid technology
The screen capture below is a good example of how ICTS's HPC is contributing towards the research community in South Africa through SAGrid. Grid technology, in this instance the gLite middleware, allows portions of an HPC cluster to be…
OpenMPI
Installed openmpi 1.4-4 as well as the MPI development suite on the test cluter.
Configured host based authentication to obviate the ssh password authentication.
Compiled a test case program. Seeing a 50% speed improvement when splitting the workload over 3…
Comparative shopping
UCT-ICTS offers BL460 dual quad core CPUs with 2.4 GHz Xeon processors. The
blades come with either 16 or 32 GB of RAM, fiber channel HBAs and dual NICs. Compared to Amazon each CPU gives approximately 2 EC2
compute units. …
PBS POC upgrade test
Tested the upgrade path of Torque from 2.5.3 to 3.0.0. Fairly easy, except one needs to remember a few things:
- shut down the pbs daemons before starting.
- run torque.setup to sort out the symlinks.
- restart the maui daemon.
Multi threaded programming and SAGrid CRL error
Investigated mixed cluster options with multiple queues for Torque.
Brief test of OMP - successful.
Started investigating MPI.
Fixed
an issue with SAGrid: The WMS had lost access to the internet due to a
proxy change hence CRL downloads were…
HPC cluster fully utilized
Deployed stats and accounting package to Virtual Box test bed. Doesn't
work so well as Vbox hides various parameters from net-snmp.
Another
maths user has joined the UCT HPC cluster and started submitting jobs.
Currently the cluster CPUs are 100%…
HPC queue longevity
Increased the default research queue (UCTlong) from 2700 to 5400 hours.…
Stats and accounting package for HPC
Started writing a stats and accounting package for our HPC cluster,
based on perl and utilizing the qstat and momctl commands. The page can
be viewed here: http://srvslngrd004.uct.ac.za/
…
…Maths jobs submitted to HPC cluster
Our first user has started submitting jobs to the cluster. The software
being used is auto07p for continuation and bifurcation problems in
ordinary differential equations. Auto07 can be compiled with OMP to
make it multi-cpu aware. Currently each job makes…