Research Computing Cluster Access

WHO: Doctoral and Post-Doctoral students

I'm happy to relay to you all the news that there is a high capacity computing cluster available for your use starting 12/10/07. There is no charge for this service. It is provided free of charge by FAS and its maintainers.

I know that many of you have wanted or needed such services in the past and have had a hard time finding it. As part of a new initiative for high performance research computing, this new cluster is being offered to those who can make use of its idle cycles.

The LSDIV-500 cluster replaces what was formerly known as DICE and has already allowed many users to build larger jobs and be more adventurous in their research than they've previously been able to.

LSDIV is made up of Red Hat Linux systems running in a 400-500 core equivalent cluster. You will have the ability to take advantage of some portion of that capacity to run your jobs or simulations. The cluster offers a wide range of tools including Matlab, R, GCC compilers for C, C++ Fortran 77, 90 & 95 as well as Intel compilers and various other standard tools. The cluster maintainers are also open to adding packages where it makes sense and does not add cost. You would be part of a group of users sharing resources and will provide an adequate, albeit modest amount of storage.

Some things to know:

* LSDIV will NOT mount FAS or Physics home directories. This is for security reasons. You will, however, be able to use standard tools to put/get data on the cluster. (this is mentioned here because DICE apparently did allow this in the past)

* You will be given new LSDIV-500 accounts specific to the cluster. This account will be used only for the LSDIV cluster and un-related to your FAS or Physics account.

* You will log in to LSDIV-500 from a dedicated portal machine. You'll receive instructions on how this works.

* You will be provided with a quota on EMC SAN storage for your data sets and results. Tentative size is 100MB but may vary with a scratch area of several terabytes.

* You will need to learn a to use the batch scheduling tool, LFS. This is not a great hurdle; its looks very similar to Sun Grid Engine or other scheduling tools you may have used. Again, information will be provided by the LSDIV team.

* You potentially have access during non-peak times to 32+ cores.

Please express your interest in taking advantage of this awesome opportunity by contacting Ford Fay ( fay@fas.harvard.edu ).
He's eager to see that the cluster is put to good use and looking forward to seeing more physicists on the cluster.