[sllug-members]: May 16, 2007 Meeting: Tour of UofU's Arches High Performance Computing Cluster

[Marc Christensen]

Everyone is welcome to a special SLLUG meeting this Wednesday, May 16, 
2007 at 7:00pm

This meeting will be a tour of the University of Utah's Center for High 
Performance Computing (CHPC) Arches Cluster.  The tour will be lead by 
Brian Haymore, the lead compute cluster admin for CHPC.

2 IMPORTANT NOTES (Location and time):

Location change:
================
We will be meeting at the North West entrance of the Komas building 
located in Research Park (which is South of Fort Douglas).

Map of the Komas Building is here (redirects to google maps):

    http://tinyurl.com/2r4wwr

Time:
=====

May, 16, 2007 @ 6:50pm

We will be meeting earlier than usual at the NW entrance of the Komas 
building.  We will wait long enough for people to arrive but will depart 
on the tour by our usual meeting start time of 7:10pm.  The doors are 
locked and we cannot prop them open so arrive early to ensure that you 
make it on the tour.

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Here's a short blurb about what we'll be seeing:

The Arches Cluster:

Using the concept of meta-clustering and highly advanced scheduling 
techniques developed at the Center for High Performance Computing, we 
provide seamless access to heterogeneous computer resources necessary 
for an integrated approach to computationally intensive research. Based 
on the extensive experience of CHPC in building and operating clusters 
of commodity hardware, we provide the resources needed for the emerging 
applications in the most cost effective manner. The Arches meta-cluster 
has many computational components: a parallel processing cluster, a data 
mining cluster, a visualization cluster, a “cycle farm” cluster, a 
condominium cluster for researches to “own” sets of nodes and a new 
general purpose cluster. Data storage takes several forms. In addition 
to users home directories, there are two types of global storage 
designed for scratch space: PVFS (parallel virtual file system) and NFS 
(networked file system). Each node on the Arches clusters has either a 
Dual (2 CPU cores) or a Dual Dual Core (4 CPU cores) AMD Opteron 
processors with speed ranging from 1.4 – 2.4 Ghz and memory ranging from 
2 – 8 Gbytes. The Arches cluster is comprised of the following sub-clusters:

Sand Dune Arch, Delicate Arch, Marching Men, Tunnel and Landscape Arch 
clusters.  Each have specific uses and configurations.

For more information about the cluster, see the description of the 
Arches cluster(s), starting on page 3 of the following PDF document:

   http://www.chpc.utah.edu/docs/CHPCReport_2007.pdf

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