Scientific Computing Services recently modified the LSF batch configuration to improve the scheduling of parallel MPI jobs which may request all of the CPU cores on one or more hosts. This was an issue on the PPA-funded "bullet" cluster which provides compute cycles for both single-slot and parallel MPI jobs. SCS is also working with the batch system vendor (IBM) in order to leverage features that may improve the batch MPI service for scientific computing customers.
Several system administrators from Scientific Computing Services attended an Intel presentation on the Lustre parallel file system. The discussion about the types of applications that are suited to Lustre and best practices for storage hardware configurations was beneficial for our support of more than 3 PetaBytes of SLAC scientific data stored on Lustre servers.