October 28th, 2009 by Allen Schiano
-
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.
July 22nd, 2009 by Francisco Lopez
-
ZotPortal
After an extensive campus-wide planning process, the student portal “ZotPortal” went live on April 27 of this year. IAT-NACS worked with Student Affairs to design the high-reliability and high-performance system hardware, and provides ongoing network and system administration services, as well as housing elements of ZotPortal in separate data centers.
Through ZotPortal students can access academic and administrative information, connect to a Facebook account, subscribe to UCI campus news, student media and entertainment feeds, check UCI libraries catalogue and even search for people and campus web sites from one search box.
Students can arrange ZotPortal’s look and layout flexibly through a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, subscribing to the particular information channels they want.
ZotPortal runs on hardware intended to provide maximal service continuity. There are duplicate servers, connected through IAT’s DMRnet. In the event one server becomes unavailable (say due to a power failure), the twin automatically assumes all portal activity. Within each physical server are many CPUs, configured to provide a flexible group of virtual servers so that ZotPortal can support very large numbers of simultaneous requests. Data is stored on a disk cluster configured with Sun’s ZFS (zettabyte file system) which provides both redundancy (data protection) and high performance parallel access.
April 8th, 2005 by Dana Roode
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.
October 15th, 2004 by Dana Roode
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.