EESI announces a new High Performance Computing resource
October 2012
EESI would like to announce a new High Performance Computing resource that is available:
Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) has just brought their newest HPC cluster, Lion XG, on line. Each computing server blade includes two Intel Xeon E5-2665 2.4 GHz 8-core processors (Sandybridge series), with 64 or 128 gigabytes of 1600 MHz memory (4 or 8 gigabytes per core), 2.5" 1 terabyte 7200 rpm NL-SAS drive, 56 gigabits/second FDR Infiniband interconnect (Mellanox Connect-X3 HCA and switches), and a separate 10 gigabits/second Ethernet network and also a 10 Gbps uplink. This hardware is likely to have a formal life span of three years but RCC typically runs a cluster several years beyond that period.
David Pollard received NSF funds to contribute to this for his research, and EESI partnered to secure priority access to 15 nodes on Lion-XG for EESI associates. As an EESI associate, if you would like to use this new cluster please contact John Miley at jmiley@eesi.psu.edu to arrange access.
One important thing to note about Lion-XG is that it is running RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 as its operating system whereas the older Lion-X systems are all running RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. Because of this some codes that were compiled on the older systems will not run on Lion-XG without recompilation. In particular, if you are running anything on the older systems that was compiled with RCC's OpenMPI implementation, you will need to recompile due to ABI incompatibilities with the new OpenMPI version. Eventually all RCC cluster will be upgraded to RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.
Please also note that whenever you write a proposal to get more such HPC equipment, EESI often can partner with you to provide more priority access to others in EESI.