Supercluster Murska will be introduced soon

11.05.2007

The new supercluster murska.csc.fi acquired by CSC last autumn has been installed and the approval tests are going on. During the tests benchmarks and application programs are run to measure the performance and the reliability of the system.

If the system passes the test runs, which last about one month, it will be opened for customers in late May or in June. The indroduction has been delayed due to the slow installation process of HP, the vendor of the system. CSC regrets the harm that the delay has caused to our customers.

Murska is dedicated for middle-size parallel jobs that scale reasonably well for large amount of processors and for serial jobs that need large memory. The scalability of the job must be demonstrated by a special scalability test, if a user wants to use more than 16 processors.

For program development and scalability purposes an interactive queue of 1 – 32 processors will be established. Those jobs who have passed the scalability test can be run with 1 – 256 processors. If the program has passed the scalability test for Infiniband portion of Sepeli, the result is valid for Murska as well.

The maximum wall-clock time for jobs is 7 days. A special queue will be established for very long jobs and the running time can then be as long as 21 days.  However these jobs can be interrupted due to e.g.  service break.

Murska contains 1024 dual-core 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron processors. The amount of memory varies from 1 to 4 Gbytes per core. The batch queuing system is SLURM/LSF. For development of user’s own programs there are Fortran 90, C and C++ compilers of the Portland Group and the GNU Compiler Collection and the HP-MPI library.

Instructions how to apply for Murska user accounts in advance are given here: http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/customerinfo/murska_accounts

A workshop for new users of Murska will be organized 11 – 15 June, 2007. More information and registration form can be found on the www-page: http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/courses/archive/hpworkshop

For additional information:

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