Just few final tests left after hardware / software upgrades, which took place during couple of weeks at the end of October 2016. The major “full blast heat generation” test will be performed on Monday 7/11/2016 to see if the server room survives. If you want to test some of your codes/jobs before then please ask Alex Pedcenko aa3025@coventry.ac.uk to enable your slurm accounts.

What have we got now:

the HPC specs we will have after the latest upgrade:

Old stuff:

• 144 nodes with 2xIntel Xeon L5530 @ 2.40GHz CPUs (Nehalem 8 CPU-cores/node), 48 Gb of RAM per node: queues all and long
• 18 nodes with 2xIntel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2440 0 @ 2.40GHz (Sandy Bridge 12 CPU-cores/node) and 2x NVidia Tesla K20 GPUs, 48 Gb RAM:  queue GPU
• 1 x 32 CPU SMP Machine Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-4620 0 @ 2.20GHz (32 CPU-cores), 512 Gb RAM: queue SMP

Compute nodes of HPC are interconnected with High-Speed QDR Infiniband (40 GBps)

New Broadwell CPU based nodes:

• 44 nodes with 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 @ 2.10GHz (32 CPU-cores/node) 128Gb RAM:   queue Broadwell
• 10 nodes with 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 @ 2.10GHz (32 CPU-cores/node) 128Gb RAM + 2x NVidia K80 GPU:  queue NGPU
• 2 nodes  with 2xIntel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 @ 2.10GHz (32 CPU-cores/node) 128Gb RAM + Xeon Phi coprocessor SE10/7120: queue Phi

2 x 15 Tb file servers (/home and /share)

Outside of zeus HPC

• One “Big Data Analytics” machine Bullion S2 server, 12 Tb storage, Xeon® processor E7 v3 family, 128Gb RAM

Compute nodes of new HPC part  are interconnected with High-Speed FDR Infiniband fabric (54 Gbps)

Alex Pedcenko

Last week, on Friday, zeus HPC did experience some significant NFS (shared filesystem /home) troubles. File system was very slow and unresponsive. Hence, during the weekend there was an unplanned maintenance, system software upgrades and, hence, shutdown of all the queues. Apologies if your running jobs were terminated. All four login nodes zeus[1-4] were reinstalled, as they were also choking with some file system errors. One of the reasons for overfilling of the /tmp space on the login nodes were multiple running VNC sessions on different login nodes. Currently, VNC sessions are limited to only one login node: zeus.

At the moment all queues are up and running again. Let me know if any occasional library is still missing on login nodes.

Website http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk is back on as well. You can access login nodes via their individual login names zeus,zeus2, zeus3, zeus (alias “zeus” isn’t yet operational)

Best Regards,
Alex Pedcenko

A simple C code for parallel multiplication of two 512×512 matrices ran with OpenMPI across 4 nodes (were applicable). Three instances of the same source code were compiled with GNU C (gcc 4.4.7), Intel 11 and PGI 11.8 compilers. Results presented on the graph below.

Both OpenMPI 1.10.2 and “the code” were compiled with the same parallel compilers (the lower the values the better performance).

The winner is:  Intel ICC compiler ! (well PGI is almost the same as Intel, but costs more money)

Alex Pedcenko

HPC zeus will be shut down for the whole day (13 hours starting 6:00AM) on Sat 19-Dec-2015 due to power maintenance works scheduled by Estates. Your reservation of the nodes will not be accepted if it falls within this time slot. HPC will be automatically powered off on 6:15 AM 19-Dec-2015.

Regards,
Alex

the power cut has been cancelled.

On the 21st of November all nodes of HPC are booked for the whole day due to potential power shutdown. So if your reservation of the nodes is falling on that day, your job may be deferred until after 21st of November.

The shorter jobs are obviously must not be deferred.
Alex Pedcenko

Hi,
due to some electric power works to be scheduled in Mezz floor server room of ECB, part of Zeus HPC (nodes zeus00-zeus71, long queue) will be shut down on Thursday, 30-July-2015 at 22:00. At the moment you can still reserve and use these nodes in the “long” queue if your job finishes before 22:00 on Thursday. If you need longer time for your job to finish, the job you submit to long queue will be placed in waiting queue until maintenance task completes (hopefully end of Friday, 31st of July).

Regards,
Alex Pedcenko

link to the space consumption by users: http://zeus/space.php

Thank you,
Alex

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/spit-satan-solar-flare-captured-5980001

You can see the “Spit” on my capture sequences here:

• http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~aa3025/sun/yellow/,
• http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~aa3025/sun/blue/
• http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~aa3025/sun/red/

wait few minutes into the animation (flare occurred at the beginning of 18th of June, scroll page to see the lower right corner of the image where the eruption happened)

Alex.

It seems there was a power failure at approx. 4:00 on 25/02/2015 in EC3-21 comms room. All nodes zeus[1-4,20-91,15,200-217] as well as file servers serving /home and /share directories went offline.

Some jobs in “long” queue continued to run. Check their status as a /home file system wasn’t accessible from 4:00…~11:00.

Regards,
Alex