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Allen Schiano

OIT Data Center

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Data Center

During October, OIT, Facilities Management, and Design and Construction Services completed the process of expanding the OIT Data Center (OITDC) facility in Engineering Gateway.  The OITDC consolidates systems from the Law Building Data Center (LBDC) and saves the campus energy and money.  It also allows the space formerly occupied by the LBDC to be used to meet the needs of the Law School.

Focus has now turned to improving engineering aspects of the data center (power, cooling, and control systems).

OIT is also redesigning housing and planning expanded capacity for the cluster systems hosted in the OITDC (HPC and GreenPlanet).  These projects are expected to continue into 2014.

High Performance Computing Cluster

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Data Center

OIT has been providing cooperative cluster computing services to UCI researchers for many years.  Comprising at various times MPC (“Medium Performance Computing”), BDUC (“Broadcom Distributed and Unified Cluster”), and even Green Planet (a cluster hosted for the School of Physical Sciences), the service continues to evolve as technology changes.

With the support of Southern California Edison’s Strategic Energy Program (SEP) which offers grants to replace older computers with new, energy-efficient systems (something of a “cash for clunkers” for computers), along with contributions from the Office of Research, OIT has been able to upgrade some of the components of the shared-use computing cluster and has rechristened it HPC (“High Performance Computing.”)  Further upgrades will take place over the coming year.

With MPC, individual researchers could add computing nodes to the cluster with the understanding that, in exchange for OIT providing environment and security, 25% of the computing capacity would be made available to the UCI research community.  In contrast, HPC uses advanced queuing and scheduling techniques developed by HPC system administrator Joseph Farran.  These techniques dynamically allow unused capacity in a given researcher’s segment of the cluster to be made available to others.  This results in a sustained use of over 90% of the massive computational capacity of the cluster.  Researchers interested in participating in HPC should contact Joseph Farran at x4-5551.

Technical specifications of the upgraded nodes include:

  • 64-core AMD CPUs providing an aggregate of over 2000 cores
  • 8 Nvidia GPUs (4 Tesla, 4 Fermi)
  • 8.8TB RAM
  • QDR Infiniband inter-node communication channel
  • 500TB storage in a Gluster distributed filesystem
  • GridEngine scheduler via 18 private/group queues and 9 free queues
  • CUDA development tools
  • licensed software including SAS, STATA, CLCBio, MATLAB, Mathematica
  • GNU, Intel and PGC compilers and Eclipse and Totalview debuggers

OIT Data Center

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Data Center

During October, OIT, Facilities Management, and Design and Construction Services will complete the process of expanding the OIT Data Center facility in Engineering Gateway.  When it is done, it will consolidate systems from the Law Building Data Center (LBDC), and save the campus energy and money.  It will also allow the space formerly occupied by the LBDC to be used to meet the needs of the Law School.

This process will require two interruptions to services.  The first, on October 6, will include:

  • A&BS websites including EH&S, Police, Facilities Management and others
  • Zotmail
  • Campus data warehouse
  • The HR Jobs site and other HR Web Applications  (QuickReq, FastClass etc.)
  • Campus Time Reporting System
  • The SNAP portal and services available through it
  • Campus cashiering, billing and credit card systems, including the Student Billing System, and DEFT for disbursement
  • PayQuest, PALweb, Equipment Management (EQS), and Permanent Budget (PBS)
  • All Graduate Division Applications
  • All Office of Research and ULAR Applications
  • FacServ Facilities ERP applications (work orders and billing), Facilities Tririga system, Facilities iPool, Fleet and Tiscor systems
  • All Kuali applications
  • Campus imaging and document storage applications (including Rapid Return, EROS, Exfiles)
  • Cascade Content Management System
  • OIT confluence wiki
  • SAMS and “Administrative” LDAP

The second interruption will take place the weekend of October 20-21 and (in addition to the services listed above) will include:

  • University Advancement systems (including Advance) and file server
  • A&BS file server
  • All Design & Construction systems
  • All Parking & Transportation systems including MyCommute, Permit Registration System; main Parking website and associated services
  • Access to the UC Learning Center (www.uclc.uci.edu)

Services hosted in Engineering Gateway and other facilities will continue to operate as normal – this includes the campus network and telephone system, email services, EEE, Academic Personnel systems, and research compute clusters.

UCI Receives Broadcom Donation

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disk array

For several years, the Broadcom corporation has been supporting computing at UC with  substantial donations of computing hardware.  Previous donations of computers and disk arrays have benefited other UCs, as well as OIT, ICS, and researchers at UCI.

Broadcom recently donated disk arrays totaling almost 100 terabytes, comprising 24 shelves of high-performance disks compatible with OIT’s existing campus disk storage, used for campus email and departmental shared space.  This donation will allow OIT to expand our available space and improve disk performance.

OIT is currently exploring making network-accessible disk space available to departments on a cost-sharing basis.  Interested departments should contact Andrew Laurence (x43966) to discuss options.

Broadcom Donations Support Research Computing

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Cluster Computing

The Broadcom Corporation is a generous donor of computing equipment to UCI.  Following its contribution of hundreds of rack-mounted compute servers in 2007, two subsequent donations of compute servers and disk storage have benefited UCI and other UC campuses.

Among the service improvements the recent Broadcom contributions have made possible are research computing equipment for the Bren School of ICS, expansion of the space available for faculty and staff email storage (increased disk quotas), augmentation of the MPC and BDUC compute clusters available to all campus researchers, and an upcoming application server.  This will allow the use of a remote-access tool (e.g. Windows Terminal) to run research software (e.g. Matlab or SAS) remotely.  The server will be highlighted in a subsequent issue of IT News.

In these times of reduced state funding, Broadcom’s ongoing support of UCI is deeply appreciated.