Introductions

MACE Research Computing Workshop 2010

Overview

Introductions

• RCS?
• HPC clusters?

RCS HPC Cluster News

• Horace, Man2e (NWGrid), Vidar (NGS). . .

Developments on Mace01 and RedQueen

• More filespace
• More compute nodes

MACE Common Filesystem

• and SSHFS

Virtual Desktops

• Virtual desktops (VNC) on login nodes for editing, etc
• Use with interactive queues for running e.g. Fluent interactive jobs

Who are RCS?

RCS? Who? What?

And why should I care?

• Research Computing Services
  • Specialist part of IT Services.

The short version:

• Look after Horace, Man2e, Redqueen, Mace01. . .
  • plus application support.

RCS

More about RCS

What is Research Computing?

• Computing to support research! Examples:
  • physics-based computational models, data-mining, Monte-Carlo methods. . .
  • use of HPC/HTC (Linux) clusters

Contact Details

• Devonshire House (University Precinct, next to RBS)
  • Visitors welcome (good coffee machine), but
  • swipecard access. . .
• Email: rcs@manchester.ac.uk
• http://www.rcs.manchester.ac.uk
• http://wiki.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/community

HPC Clusters

HPC Clusters

• The nature of an HPC cluster
• Why you should be using them

Why use an HPC cluster?

The Nature of an HPC Cluster

UoM HPC Cluster News

UoM HPC Cluster News

RCS-owned (i.e., not MACE-owned and excluding RedQueen) clusters:

• Man2(e)
• Horace
• Vidar

Man2e

• Hardware maintenance of head/compute nodes renewed for last time
• not disk array
• There will be no further investment in this system.
• If you need more than a year's compute resource, find an alternative cluster!

Horace

• Leased; service ends this July (2010)
• No centrally-funded replacement
• If you use Horace, find an alternative compute resource now!

Vidar

• NGS cluster (256 cores)
• Now 75% owned by UoM:
  • provide stop-gap service after Horace
  • already 2.5 years old. . .

Developments on Mace01 and RedQueen

Developments on Mace01 and RedQueen

Developments on Mace01

New File Servers

• Two new fileservers (thanks to Alistair Revell, Peter Stansby)
• New login node coming. . .

Filesystems and Backups

• home-dirs occasionally snapshotted to RedQueen (weekly?)
• backed up properly one day. . .
• plenty of scratch space

Mace01a and VNC

• Virtual desktop service
• more + demo later. . .

Revolving Green Fund

• Replace old kit with new, more efficient kit, using RGF loan?
• Decision currently with IT Services SMT. . .

Developments on RedQueen

RSN: New Hardware

• New disk arrays, total 24TB
• 36 new compute nodes (now 36 + 11 nodes, total 520 cores)
• Fast interconnect — Infiniband — for the 36

Filesystems and Backups

• /home1 and /home2 are backed up (total 270GB)
• /snap1, /snap2, ...
• TBs of scratch space coming.

Future

• 24-core nodes (AMD Magny-Cours) — who has some money?

MACE Common Filesystem

MACE Common Filesystem

Wouldn't it be nice if my home-dir was the same on RedQueen, Mace01, Man2e. . .

MACE Common Filesystem Details

• /mace-common-1 is a filesystem common to RedQueen, Mace01 and Man2e
• only login nodes currently
• Distributed, replicated/mirrored (not otherwise backed up — yet)
• GlusterFS

More

• More

Getting a MACE Common Dir

• Ask
• Need UID alignment across clusters

SSHFS

Mount my home-dir and mace-common-1 on my local desktop?

SSHFS

• Mounts any filesystem accessible via SSH
• User-space filesystem based on FUSE
• unpriviliged users can mount
• Read/write access same as after SSH login

Installation

Debian (and Ubuntu?):

  apt-get install sshfs

Fedora 12:

  yum install fuse-sshfs

Using SSHFS

Mount

  desktop> mkdir ~/redqueen ~/mace-common-1
  desktop> sshfs simonh@redqueen.rcs.manchester.ac.uk: ~/redqueen

or

  desktop> sshfs simonh@redqu...uk:/mace-common-1 ~/mace-common-1

Access Files

  desktop> ls  ~/redqueen

  benchmarking    Qacct.pm~    test_openmpi_gcc44_gfortran44
  bin		  Qstat.pm     test_openmpi_gcc_gfortran
  CLUSTER	  Qstat.pm~    test_openmpi_gcc_gfortran_mx
  .               .            .
  .               .            .

Umount

  fusermount -u ~/redqueen
  fusermount -u ~/mace-common-1

Virtual Desktops

Virtual Desktops

• What?
• A virtual office desktop
• Using with interactive jobs

VNC

• mace01

More

• VNC

VNC on Mace01a

Using VNC with SGE Interactive Queues

Questions

Questions?