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High Performance Computing

Mac Cluster Available

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Apple has donated to UCI a small computational cluster based on its XServe product line.

This three-server cluster (two computational nodes and one control or “head” node) is built on the PowerPC chip. Each node features two 2Ghz PPC CPUs. The cluster also offers a 1.2Tb (1200 Gigabytes) disk array. The PowerPC architecture features high-performance true 64-bit floating point arithmetic, and is particularly well-suited for floating point and vector calculations.

Originally, NACS and faculty evaluated batch processing systems for the cluster under the Macintosh OS X operating system. Currently the cluster is running Linux, because faculty tend to be more familiar with that operating system, and to take advantage of the richer software development environment available under Linux.

GNU compilers for C, C++, and Fortran are available on the cluster, as well as the optimized IBM C/C++ compiler suite for PowerPC. Faculty may contact NACS for accounts, assistance with porting, and benchmarking.

ESMF Open to Campus Researchers

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UCI’s Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF) offers accounts to all UCI researchers and students interested in High Performance Computing. The ESMF presently consists of a cluster of 88 IBM Power4 CPUs in seven 8-way and one 32-way SMP nodes running AIX 5.1L. The Visual Age compilers fully support OpenMP and MPI. The computational environment is batch-oriented and is suitable for large- scale numerical simulations. The environment is similar to that found at many national supercomputer centers, but, we hope, with less bureaucracy. Instructions for obtaining an ESMF account are at

http://www.ess.uci.edu/esmf/accounts.html

Idle ESMF CPU time is a waste and the goal is to minimize it. We have constructed a batch queue environment which gives priority to the earth-systems simulations which are its primary task, and places other jobs in queues of lower priority (standby queues). This allows other UCI researchers to benefit from idle CPU time without penalizing ESMF’s core users.