June 29, 2007
Dear NCSA User Community:
Following an extended installation and Friendly User period for the NCSA's
Dell PowerEdge 1955 Blade Server Cluster, dubbed "abe", NCSA will be
moving the resource into production mode on July 9, 2007. The Friendly
User period has been very useful in sorting out the issues with setting up
and configuring the environment, and a number of the Friendly Users have
been quite successful in bringing their applications up and optimizing
them. NCSA staff have been working to bring the cluster to a production
state and we look forward to the system being a useful addition to the
available resources.
In order to have access beyond July 9, 2007, those with current Friendly
User projects will need to either have a peer-reviewed allocation or
request a Development Allocation project on the system. For information
on getting allocations see:
Access to the abe blade server cluster will be discontinued at 12:00am
July 9, 2007. At that point in time the system will have all final
preparations to move into production mode including the removal of all
Friendly User accounts and the establishment of all accounts associated
with projects for production mode. The system will again become available
before the end of the day on July 9.
Since this resource is intended to provide an evolutionary path for users
of tungsten, NCSA's Dell PowerEdge 1750 cluster, we would like to
encourage those with current allocations on tungsten that can meet the use
policies for abe (namely, to regularly run applications at 1,000 cores or
more), to transfer all or part of their remaining tungsten allocations to
abe. A favorable conversion rate of 1.5:1 for tungsten to abe SUs is
available through August 31, 2007 for current tungsten allocations. To
request transfers of allocations to abe, please contact the NCSA
Allocations staff at allocations@ncsa.uiuc.edu. In that email indicate
the project principal investigator, the project PSN (three letter project
code), and whether you wish to transfer all the tungsten service units or
only a partial number of the service units (list how many SUs.)
The production environment on abe will consist of 1200 compute blade nodes
each configured as follows:
2 Intel64 "Clovertown" Processors (2.33GHz, quad core)
8 GBytes RAM
1 InfiniBand (IB) interface
All the nodes have shared access to a 100TByte filesystem (Lustre
filesystem). More details regarding the abe cluster at NCSA are available
at:
If you should have any questions, please feel free to direct them to me,
John Towns by phone at 217-244-3228 or by email at
jtowns@ncsa.uiuc.edu or to the NCSA Consulting Office,
consult@ncsa.uiuc.edu (217-244-1144).
Regards,
John Towns