What went right?
- The HPC rack was neatened up. This involved moving and consolidating servers, making space for PDU's and removing redundant cables that were impeding airflow. New HPC servers were installed. This task took two entire days as other
Post maintenance work
Data centre upgrade
Over the last few months the ICTS facilities team have been preparing for a large data centre upgrade on Upper Campus. The data centre has been rewired allowing for a second UPS supply to the racks as well as a
…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…