Difference between revisions of "Hardware:SW"

The SW cluster has been decomissioned. Please refer to the Frontenac Cluster

SW (Linux) Cluster Nodes ("old" sw series)
Host	CPU model	Speed	Cores	Threads	Memory
sw0044	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
sw0045	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
sw0046	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
sw0047	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
sw0048	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
sw0049	Xeon E7-4860	2.3GHz	40	80	256 GB
Software (SW) Linux Cluster

Type of Hardware

This cluster consists of X86 multicore nodes made by Lenovo and IBM. All nodes run CentOS Linux and share a file system. Access is handled by Grid Engine. The server nodes are called cac019...cac099.

• Presently, the workup node of the "Software Cluster" is swlogin1. This is a Dell PowerEdge R410 Server with 2 sockets with a 6-core Intel® Xeon® processor (Intel x5675) running at 3.1 GHz.

• Most nodes on the cluster were built by Lenovo and are of the Lenovo NeXtScale nx360 M5 type. These are based on 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 12-core CPUs that run at 2.2 GHz, for a total of 24 cores per node.

• Larger high-memory nodes were added at the same time (August 2016). These are of the Lenovo System x3950 x6 8-socket type with 8 x Intel E7-8867 v3 16-core processors at 2.5 GHz for a total of 128 cores (dually hyperthreaded). Each of these units has a total of 2 TB of memory. They are used for special applications that require high memory.

• Some older nodes are IBM XServers 3850-X5 that are also based on the Intel® Xeon® processor (Intel E7-4860). These servers have a total of 40 cores per node and support for up to 80 threads (hyperthreading). The clock speed for these machines is 2.27GHz. Two of these servers (sw0050-51) have a 1 TB of physical memory, the others have 256 GB.

• A few of our nodes are IBM Servers based on the Intel E7-8860 processors with 80 cores total (160 threads) running at 2.27 GHz, while another one (sw0053) with 80 cores (160 threads) uses the E7-8870 at 2.4 GHz. Each of these have 512 GB of memory.

Why these Systems?

The main emphasis in these systems is a high floating-point performance for a modest number of processes / threads. Since commercial software such as Fluent and Abaqus offer support for Linux only, this cluster was originally acquired to offer recent versions of these software packages. In addition, the higher single-core performance of these nodes allows for an efficient use of license seats which usually a priced per-core.

Who Should Use This Cluster?

The software cluster runs on the Linux operating system and should be used by anyone who wants to run applications that are available on that platform. Runs that require more than 32 Gbyte of memory need to request this explicitly to avoid mis-scheduling.

We suggest you use this cluster if:

• Your application is floating-point intensive with modest amounts of memory.

• Your application is commercial or public-domain software that supports Linux.

• Your application is explicitly parallel (for instance, using MPI) and has low communication requirements, or is multi-threaded with a small number (typically no more than 12) of scaling threads.

• Your application uses a commercial license that is scaled per process.

This cluster may not be suitable if:

• Your application is very memory intensive. Long waiting time may be the consequence.

• Your application is required to scale to a very large number of processes in a distributed-memory fashion and is communication intensive. Such jobs require a fast interconnect (Infiniband or similar) and should be run on a different system, for instance other Compute Canada installations.

If you think your application could run more efficiently on these machines, please contact us (cac.help@queensu.ca) to discuss any concerns and let us assist you in getting started.

Note that we have to enforce dedicated cores or CPUs to avoid sharing and context switching overheads. No "overloading" can be allowed.

Using the Cluster

Access

• Indirectly through ssh from sflogin0:

ssh hpcXXXX@130.15.59.64
hpcXXXX@130.15.59.64's password: *****
hpcXXXX@sflogin0$ ssh swlogin1
hpcXXXX@swlogin1's password: ***** 

The file systems for all of our clusters are shared, so you will be using the same home directory as when you are using the M9000 servers or the standard login node sfnode0. swlogin1 can be used for compilation, program development, and testing only, not for production jobs.

Compiling Code

Intel Compiler Suite

The best compiler to use is the Intel Compiler Suite. This includes compilers for Fortran, C, and C++, as well as MPI and OpenMP support, debuggers and development suite. This software resides in /opt/ics. The versions are:

• Fortran (ifort): Intel(R) Fortran Intel(R) 64 Compiler XE for applications running on Intel(R) 64, Version 12.1 Build 20110811
• C (icc): Intel(R) C Intel(R) 64 Compiler XE for applications running on Intel(R) 64, Version 12.1 Build 20110811
• C++ (icpc): Intel(R) C++ Intel(R) 64 Compiler XE for applications running on Intel(R) 64, Version 12.1 Build 20110811