June maintenance slot
ICTS will be conducting power maintenance in their data centers on Sunday the 26th of June between 09:00 and 17:00. The Bremner data center will be shut down completely and hence the Hal Slurm cluster will be offline. We will…
Compiling the latest GCC version 5.3.0
Previously on our blog we described how to install the GNU C compiler. Since then GNU have updated their installation instructions which makes things much easier: “The difficult way, which is not recommended, is to download the sources for GMP,…
HPC January maintenance
The ICTS hex cluster will be down for scheduled maintenance from Monday January 11th 09:00 to Tuesday January 12th 17:00. The head node, data node and all worker nodes will be patched and rebooted, hence all jobs should be canceled…
Worker job submission
Most clusters have the ability to submit jobs from inside other jobs. Until recently this was disabled on hex. We have now enabled this facility on the series600 nodes. You can now call qsub from inside your job script although…
The next HPC hurdle: Co-Design
Co-Design is a new HPC infrastructure design, essentially the next level of performance and scale. Co-design in a nutshell is the ability to reduce as much of the CPU cycle operations to a design whereby there are synergies created between…
11 Million CPU hours
Yesterday we received our 50th citation and this morning the HPC clusters exceeded 11 million CPU hours since the commencement of the HPC initiative at ICTS. 5 Years ago almost to the day the first UCT researcher submitted jobs to…
Parallel Octave
We’ve tested the parallel package for Octave and it seems to work fairly well. To install this in your local folder run Octave and type: pkg install -verbose -local -forge struct pkg install -verbose -local -forge parallel pkg list Package…
Docker and the UCT eResearch HPC
“Build, Ship, and Run Any App, Anywhere” is a bold statement to make but it sure does live up to it. For the past few weeks the team has been working on incorporating Docker into the UCT eResearch HPC Cluster…
Octave
We have installed GNU Octave on our clusters. From their website: “GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical …
Core reservation in PBS
Researchers who bother to read the Acceptable Usage Policy may have noticed there is a clause which states: Users must abide by the ratio of 2GB of RAM (memory) per allocated core. Usage of the pmem directive should also be…