EESI Facilities

ECF WebsiteEnvironmental Computing Facility

John Miley, Director

High Performance Computing (HPC) at the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) is going in new directions with new hardware and different funding sources. A new HPC facility called the Environmental High Performance Computing Facility (EHPCF) is now operational, largely funded by the Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis. (Read Update)

The EHPCF facility consists of 32 4-way Opteron nodes (for a total of 128 CPUs) which will become part of the Lion-XO cluster which is run by the Penn State High Performance Computing and Visualization group. This group is part of ITS and the group’s director is Vijay Agarwala. For more information about the HPC group see: http://gears.aset.psu.edu/hpc/

The cluster is physically located in the Computer building and is administered by Vijay's group. A more detailed description of the Lion-XO cluster is appended below. The current state of the Lion-XO cluster (new EESI nodes not yet included as they have not yet been installed) may be viewed at: http://gears.aset.psu.edu/hpc/systems/lionxo/

The principal funding for the EHPCF comes from the NSF/DOE-funded Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis (CEKA) and from match monies from the University and Colleges. The new facility is intended to stimulate research and education in environmental chemical kinetics and environmental data synthesis. CEKA associates (PIs and co-PIs and their students) and affiliates (PSU personnel pursuing questions in environmental kinetics that desire to be involved in CEKA) will be given primary user (high priority) status. Each CEKA affiliate and associate will be allowed approximately 10K CPU-hours per year.

EESI System Administrator John Miley will facilitate and promote student and faculty usage of the EHPCF. Non-CEKA users are encouraged to petition for similar status through contributions to the salary of John Miley. An annual investment of $5K contribution to John Miley's salary will provide access to THE EHPCF with the same priority and usage as CEKA associates and affiliates. These arrangements can be made through John Miley.

We hope that this new facility will be of benefit to many environmental scientists on campus and that it will become self-sustaining. Your comments and questions are welcome. Any questions regarding the use of EHPCF should be directed to John Miley (jmiley@essc.psu.edu).

Appendix:

Lion-XO in its current state consists of - 1 Login Node: Sun SunFire v20z 1U Rackmount Server with:

The EESI nodes that will be added are - 32 Compute Nodes: Sun SunFire v40z 3U Rackmount Servers, each with:

The SCSI disks coming with these machines will probably be distributed over the whole of Lion-XO so that there's enough scratch disk local to each machine to handle the needs of CEKA members like Jim Kubicki (whose jobs each use 100+ GB of scratch space).

For base interconnect (admin and file server traffic):

For high-speed interconnect (parallel job communication network):

For more information about CEKA, please contact:

John Miley
2217 Earth-Engineering Sciences Building
Earth and Environmental Systems Institute
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802
Telephone: 814.863.8104
FAX: 814.865.3191
Email: jmiley@eesi.psu.edu
Website: http://gears.aset.psu.edu/hpc/