{"id":876,"date":"2010-07-17T11:16:32","date_gmt":"2010-07-17T18:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=876"},"modified":"2010-10-05T11:16:55","modified_gmt":"2010-10-05T18:16:55","slug":"high-performance-computing-clusters-in-the-computer-science-department-cal-poly-slo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=876","title":{"rendered":"High Performance Computing Clusters in the Computer Science Department, Cal Poly, SLO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cal Poly, SLO<\/a>, where I work is a teaching university.\u00a0 We don’t do a lot of research and historically, there hasn’t been a lot of high performance computing on campus.\u00a0 A number of years ago, Information Technology Services<\/a> (ITS, the central campus computing people) got a grant and set up a small cluster for general use<\/a>.\u00a0 Users of this cluster that I’ve talked to weren’t very happy with it.\u00a0 It wan’t particularly big, and it wasn’t particularly easy to use.\u00a0 Since then, various faculty with research projects have gotten their own clusters which their departments operated, not ITS.\u00a0 The first cluster I’m aware of like this was ravel.csc.calpoly.edu, which I helped spec out, buy, rack up, and loaded the operating system on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"ravel<\/a>

ravel.csc.calpoly.edu<\/p><\/div>\n

Ravel.csc.calpoly.edu is a 23 node high performance computing cluster located in the Computer Science Department, Cal Poly, SLO, building 14-238<\/a>.\u00a0 It was originally acquired by Dr. Diana Franklin<\/a> with an NSF grant<\/a> in April of 2007.\u00a0 The compute nodes are two socket, 2 core machines (4 cores per node) for a total of 92 64 bit cores of Intel Xeon 5130<\/a> at 2 GHz.\u00a0 Each node has 4GB of memory.\u00a0 Nodes use Gigabit Ethernet for interconnect.\u00a0 The head node has a 1TB external array of SAS drives to hold user data.\u00a0 User home directories are mounted with NFS.<\/p>\n

Ravel runs a Linux distribution for HPC named Rocks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"steger.aero.calpoly.edu\"<\/a>

steger.aero.calpoly.edu<\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. David Marshall<\/a> in the Cal Poly Aerospace Engineering<\/a> Department got a grant to buy a cluster for research.\u00a0 He bought a small cluster from PSSC Labs<\/a>.\u00a0 Steger.aero.calpoly.edu has 11 nodes.\u00a0 Each compute node is a two socket, quad core machine (8 cores per node) for a total of 88 64 bit cores of AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2378<\/a> at 2.4 GHz.\u00a0 Each node has 32GB of memory.\u00a0 Nodes have both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet for interconnects.\u00a0 The cluster has a separate 4TB filer acting as an NFS server to hold user data.\u00a0 User home directories are mounted with NFS.<\/p>\n

The AERO department did not have a space with proper power or cooling to operate steger, so they asked us if we could host it for them.\u00a0 We moved it to the Computer Science department machine room in August 2009.\u00a0 So I’m now the administrator for steger.\u00a0 One of the first things I did was reload steger with Rocks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"tesla.csc.calpoly.edu\"<\/a>

tesla.csc.calpoly.edu<\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. Chris Lupo<\/a> got a grant to explore using the rendering engines on video cards as compute nodes in a cluster.\u00a0 NVIDIA now sells what were “video cards” as General Purpose Graphics Processing Units<\/a> (GPGPU or GPU).\u00a0 We wound up buying a workstation from AMAX that has four NVIDIA Tesla 2050 GPU cards<\/a> in it.\u00a0 That\u2019s four times 448 cores per card = 1792 GPU cores in a 4U workstation form factor.\u00a0 It came preloaded with Debian on it.\u00a0 We’re considering putting Rocks on it, too.<\/p>\n

I’m the primary system administrator for all of these systems ( Greg Porter<\/a>, glporter @ calpoly. edu).\u00a0 Email me if you have issues.\u00a0 Other system administrators might be able to help as well, try computer-science-sysadmins @ polymail. calpoly. edu.\u00a0 All of these clusters are open for general use by students, faculty, and staff.\u00a0 Email Greg Porter or the sysadmins (addresses above) if you\u2019d like an account.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cal Poly, SLO, where I work is a teaching university.\u00a0 We don’t do a lot of research and historically, there hasn’t been a lot of high performance computing on campus.\u00a0 A number of years ago, Information Technology Services (ITS, the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}