IT Services

HPC news: Autumn 2012

During the summer, IT Services upgraded the Bright cluster management software and Lustre parallel file system on the High Performance Computing Facility.

The new Lustre version allows us to make full use of high capacity 2TB and 3TB disks and together with the Bright upgrade enables us to support the new AMD Interlagos and Intel Sandy Bridge processor architectures under Scientific Linux V6.

The cluster has been reconfigured to use a new dedicated cluster master node and two login nodes (feynman and apollo), lessening the impact of problems with the latter two on the cluster as a whole.

Two 64 core AMD Interlagos computing nodes and an extra 18TB of Lustre storage were purchased by Informatics and have been integrated into the cluster. These were funded through a multi-site EPSRC research grant entitled “A Unified Model of Compositional and Distributional Semantics: Theory and Applications”.

These nodes and storage will be used by natural language processing researchers conducting large-scale evaluations of recently developed models of semantic composition that involve semantic knowledge automatically acquired from large bodies of text.

The Experimental Particle Physics (EPP) group, which participates in the CERN ATLAS experiment, has had their STFC rolling grant renewed, and will be adding more Lustre storage and compute nodes to the cluster at the beginning of next year.

For further information or to apply for a user account on the apollo HPC facility , please email researchsupport@its.sussex.ac.uk