Dalton

Revision as of 19:44, 8 April 2018

Description

Dalton is a small cluster featuring both IBM Power PC and Intel Xeon CPU's. It is equipped with the following hardware/software:

• 8 nodes with 2 x CPU Ibm PPC6 (8 cores), 24 GB of RAM, 1 x 140 GB HD SAS, Infiniband, OS Red Hat Linux Server Enterprise release 5.3.
• 6 nodes with 2 x CPU Intel Xeon X5650 2.6 GHz (12 cores), 48 GB of RAM, 2 x 300 GB HD SAS, Infiniband, OS Red Hat Linux Server Enterprise release 5.5.

for a total of 14 nodes, 208 cores.

Access

• Linux and Mac OS users can login within the DiSC internet connection using a terminal with the command:

ssh account@192.168.9.14

or from outside the Department using

ssh -p 50002 account@147.162.63.10

where "account" is the user's account.

• Windows users can use an interface program to the ssh service, e.g. Putty.

Queues

The queue manager is LL for the IBM nodes and PBS for the Intel nodes. The following queues are available:

• dalton-IBM: max nodes 5, max walltime 336:00:00 (2 weeks)
• dalton-Intel: max nodes 3, max walltime 336:00:00 (2 weeks)
• dalton-long: max 2 nodes, max walltime 1500:00:00 (ca. 2 months), Intel Xeon processors only. This queue is to be used strictly to run jobs that do not allow checkpointing of the status of the calculation. This is considered an exceptional case, thus penalties are applied: i) a maximum of total 1 jobs can run at the same time on this queue, and ii) the initial priority is set to -1440 minutes, meaning that with respect to the normal queues, jobs on the avogadro-long queue shall wait for an additional day.

Example PBS file

A typical PBS input file script will be as follow (see the Support page for more help):

#!/bin/sh --login
#PBS -N jobname
#PBS -A account
#PBS -q dalton-intel
#PBS -l nodes=n
#PBS -w time in hh:mm:ss format

commands to execute

where the parts in italic should be changed as appropriate.