What is the HPC?
Introduction
The High Performance Cluster is a SRIF-funded facility to support EPSRC, ESRC and NERC researchers at Lancaster who require high performance computing. This includes programs which might run for more than one hour on the interactive Unix service, programs which require a gigabyte or more of memory, or programs which require access to datasets of more than a gigabyte in size.
The combined facility offers a theoretical peak performance of 3.4 Tflops, 1.6 TB of memory and 8TB of file storage. A portion of the facility is dedicated to hosting separate grid facilities; the NWDA-funded North West Grid, and the National Grid Service. These web pages describe the (non-grid) HPC facilities available to researchers at Lancaster.
How It Works
The HPC has three basic components; the frontend node, where users login in to submit jobs; the execution nodes, which run those jobs; and a high performance file system, which shares user and other files across the cluster.
From the frontend node, users create a batch job script which describes the tasks their job(s) are to perform in a format similar to a unix shell script. The batch job is then submitted to the Sun Grid Engine job scheduler, which will portion out user jobs to free execution nodes. Job submission commands can be supplemented with additional information, such as requests for specific amounts of memory (for large memory jobs), or multiple nodes (in the case of parallel jobs).
Hardware
Frontend: The frontend node is a Sun Fire X4200 server with two 2.6GHz AMD Opteron CPUs and 16G of memory.
Execution nodes: The execution nodes are 124 Sun Fire X4100 servers with two dual-core 2.4GHz Opteron CPUs, for a total of 4 CPUs per node. The standard memory per node is 8G, with a few nodes offering 16G. Most nodes also offer dedicated inter-processor communication in the form of SCore over gigabit ethernet, to support message passing (parallel) applications.
File store: The file storage system is an 8TB Panasas Activescale Storage Cluster.
Software
A number of statistical and numerical packages are installed in addition to Fortran 90, C and C++ compilers. Guides to the use of the packages are available here
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