RI Update April 2016
DPSF
The Data-Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) is now available to early-adopters. The DPSF is a new computational platform (developed from Hydra) which is complementary to the highly-successful Computational Shared Facility (CSF) which has been in production for several years — the DPSF is specified for high-memory and IO-intensive work. The platform comprises:
- compute nodes with either 256 GB or 512 GB of RAM,
- a /scratch filesystem of over 600 TB,
and, of course, has the same home-directories and research group shared areas as the CSF and our other platforms.
Some limited free-at-the-point-of-use computation time is available.
For more information about the DPSF please read the introductory slidedeck or email us at
its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk.
Off-campus access to data-sets from the CSF and DPSF — NATaaS
For important security-related reasons, our computational platforms are not accessible directly from off-campus — nor can our platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus. Instead Web and FTP downloads are made via the University Web-proxy. However, some applications cannot use the Web-proxy, including those that access off-site genomics databases as part of the computational work on, for example, The CSF.
To solve this problem, we have introduced a proxy service (more accurately, a network address translation service). Users who wish to download data-sets as part of their computational work should contact the Research Infrastructure Team via email at its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk.
The CSF keeps on growing and growing…
By the time you read this, there will be 96 Infiniband-connected Intel Haswell-based nodes in the CSF, equivalent to over 2,300 cores. The CSF total core count will be over 8,000.
End of University Financial Year Procurements
The University end of financial year is not far away! As usual, we anticipate making a procurement for the CSF and other Research Infrastructure platforms at this time. (We already have committed funds from multiple PIs!)
If you have funds which you would like to be included in this procurement round, please contact us IMMEDIATELY. The procurement will likely be pushed out at the END OF MAY to ensure hardware is on site and can be paid for in time for July 31.