Scientific Computing Services staff rearranged tape backups on its existing backup server to better accommodate the heavy load from PPA and LCLS UNIX servers. In addition, a second backup server was set up to split off some of the load. These changes provide faster and more reliable backups for science data.
Scientific Computing Services updated OS and application software for PPA and Photon Science GPU computing. The KIPAC cluster has 3 NVIDIA "Tesla 2070" GPUs and the SIMES cluster has 24 NVIDIA "Tesla 2050" GPUs. All systems were upgraded to RHEL 6.5 with the latest CUDA GPU driver and API. These upgrades enable users to submit single-slot and parallel jobs to the clusters via the central batch system.
Scientific Computing Services extended the new LSF cgroups feature on RHEL 6 systems to the general queues, after running it without incident in the ATLAS queues. Cgroups are designed to manage the resources in our batch cluster, preventing the inadvertent overuse of resources by some jobs and improving the overall throughput of LSF.