Murska opened for users

12.07.2007

The new supercluster of CSC, known as murska.csc.fi, has passed the acceptance tests and has been opened for customers Thursday, July 12, 2007. Those user accounts, that have been applied and accepted beforehand, have been activated.

The introduction of Murska to customers was delayed six months due to shipment and installation problems by HP.  CSC regrets the inconvenience that the delay caused to its customers.

Murska increases the cluster capacity of CSC to more than five times the earlier. The system includes 1024 AMD dual-core Opteron processors with the clock rate of 2.6 GHz. Amount of memory per core varies from 1 to 4 Gbytes between nodes. The theoretical peak performance of the system is 10.6 Tflop/s.

Murska is meant for middle-size parallel jobs that scale well for 2 – 256 processors and for serial jobs that need large memory. If a user wants to run ones job with more than 32 cores one has to prove the scalability of the program by a special test.

The programming environment of Murska includes the Cluster Development Kit from Portland Group (PGI), PathScale Compiler Suite and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These offer Fortran, C and C++ compilers. MPI, OpenMP and HPF are supported for parallel programming. The graphical debugger PGDBG and the profiling tool PGPROF are also available.

Murska is mainly used to run users' own codes. The batch processing system is LSF-HPC with the integrated resource management system SLURM.

For program development there is an interactive queue of 1 – 32 cores. That is intended for debugging the program code and testing its scalability. If the code has passed the scalability test it can be run with 1 – 256 cores. The scalability tests of the code in the InfiniBand portion of Sepeli are also valid on Murska.

The maximum wall-clock time of a parallel job is 48 hours. There is a special queue of 21 days  for very long runs. These runs can be interrupted unfinished in case of maintenance breaks.

To get a user account for Murska one has to fill the application form. More information on the application process is available on the web page

http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/customerinfo/murska_accounts

For more information on using Murska, see Murska User's Guide.

Additional information: Ville Savolainen, phone +358 9 457 2052, email: ville.savolainen at csc.fi.