Scientific Computing Services continues to make improvements to the batch service. The production LSF configuration now supports the NVIDIA GPUs in the SUNCAT Photon Science cluster. The job scheduler will now track GPU and CPU usage independently, increasing the overall utilization of the cluster.
Scientific Computing Services installed a recompiled OpenMPI package on the PPA "bullet" and "orange" clusters. This upgrade provides tighter integration with the OpenMPI runtime environment and makes it easier to run parallel compute jobs with LSF.
Scientific Computing Services held its first Town Hall meeting on Unix Services on Thursday, December 12. The meeting was attended by approximately 30 people from around the Lab. The agenda included an overview of SCS organization, recent activities, plans for the next 1-3 months, and a lightning talk on "Serf - A lightweight ad-hoc event system for batch job coordination". This event was held to promote communication, cooperation and collaboration among scientific computing professionals at SLAC.
SCS bullet points for week ending 2013/12/13
Scientific Computing Services provisioned 175 Terabytes of additional NFS storage for the Dark Energy Survey group (DES).
Scientific Computing Services has upgraded from OpenAFS 1.6.1 to 1.6.5 on Red Hat Enterprise 6, which provides the SLAC community with the latest stable version of AFS that addresses some known bugs.
Scientific Computing Services is now running LSF version 9.1.1.1 in a test environment. This release provides new features which may benefit MPI users.
SCS bullet points for week ending 2013/12/06
Scientific Computing Services manages several GPU compute clusters. SCS recognizes that although many customers cannot purchase their own clusters outright, they still want to investigate porting applications to GPUs. To build support for a shared GPU cluster, SCS worked with Deborah Bard, an LSST cosmologist, to organize a meeting to discuss GPU computing. SCS staff and Deborah will write a proposal to encourage vendors to donate hardware for a shared GPU cluster at SLAC.
Scientific Computing Services provided added flexibility to the ERP disk backup storage system by using Red Hat Linux Volume Manager to reconfigure the storage partition. This change will enable dynamic space resizing and deployment to satisfy future ERP requirements.