Information Technology News

Greenplanet: Cluster Computing for Physical Sciences

Physical Sciences, with support from IAT-NACS, has assembled a high-performance computing cluster for climate modeling and other computational-intensive research.

Called “Greenplanet,” the cluster comprises nodes purchased by faculty in Earth Systems Sciences (ESS), Chemistry, and Physics, and it is expected that Math faculty will also participate.  At this time, Greenplanet includes almost 900 CPUs and is still growing.

IAT provides secure, climate-controlled space in the Academic Data Center,  system administration services as a team with Physical Sciences IT staff, and consultation on code parallelization and optimization.

According to Assistant Professor Keith Moore of ESS, Greenplanet is “a flexible cluster, suitable for massively parallel complex computations (such as climate simulations), and for smaller-scale use on a single node as a workstation.”

A typical node features 8 64-bit Intel CPUs.  Greenplanet features the Load Sharing Facility (LSF) for job management and the Lustre caching file system for extremely high-performance access to the large datasets typical of climate modeling.  Two message passing techniques are available for parallel code: OpenMP for communication between CPUs on a node, and MPI for communication between CPUs on different nodes.  Greenplanet also has the high-performance Infiniband interlink between nodes for high-speed communications.  There is extensive instrumentation available for tuning jobs to optimal execution speed and use of all available computational capacity in the cluster.

Software includes the Climate Systems Modeling package, parallel Matlab, and quantum chemistry packages such as Gaussian and Turbomole.

New Computing Cluster

Last year, Broadcom graciously donated over 400 compute servers to UC Irvine. While the majority of the servers were distributed to campus researchers, NACS and the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences have collaborated to bring a new general-purpose campus computing solution to researchers and graduate students at no charge.

Initially, the Broadcom Distributed Unified Cluster (BDUC) is comprised of 80 nodes: 40 nodes with 32-bit Intel processors and 40 nodes with 64-bit AMD processors. Broadcom is expected to donate newer servers over time, allowing nodes to be upgraded.  NACS and ICS plan to further expand the cluster as well, subject to available staff and Data Center resources.

BDUC includes standard open-source compilers, debuggers, and libraries; in addition, the MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine (DCE) will soon be available.  In the near future, BDUC will offer priority queues for research groups that provide financial support or hardware to the cluster.

BDUC is now available to all faculty, staff, and graduate using your UCInetID and password. To request an account, send an e-mail to bduc-request@uci.edu.  A new user how-to guide is available on the NACS website http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/bduc/newuser.html.