Computer News No. 106, Nov-Dec 2003

High Performance Computing System with 128 Dual-Xeon Nodes Installed

 

Introduction System Configuration Running Jobs on hpcpower.hku.hk Account Application Procedure

1. Introduction

The Computer Centre is pleased to announce that a new High-Performance Computing (HPC) system with 128 dual-Xeon nodes has recently been installed for meeting the growing needs of HPC resources to support computation-intensive research projects of the University.

This 128-node dual-XeonHPC system, which  has been given the host-name of "hpcpower.hku.hk", has a theoretical peak  processing speed (Rpeak value) of 1433.6 GFlops, the fastest in Hong Kong. It is about 20 times more powerful than the existing hkuhpcc system in the Computer Centre, and has just been ranked the 240th position on the world-wide Top 500 Supercomputer list released in November 2003.

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2. System Configuration

The hpcpower.hku.hk system comprises 128 compute-nodes and one master node, each of which is configured with two 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2GB of RAM. A RAID system containing 500GB of user disk space is attached to the master node which supports the dual functions of an interactive processing node and a file-server for the system. All the compute-nodes and the master node are connected by a Gigabit Ethernet for both inter-node communications and external user communications.

Software installed on this system include BLAS mathematical library, Gaussian 03 with LINDA, PGI compiler suites for C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran, PBS job queue system and the Maui job scheduler.  System software in the hpcpower system is similar to that in the hkuhpcc system, but the user file directories are completely independent of the hkuhpcc system.

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3. Running Jobs on hpcpower.hku.hk

Interactive Telnet Sessions

For  program development tasks, including program editing, compilation, testing and debugging, that need to be done interactively through telnet sessions, users can login to the hpcpower.hku.hk system directly. Since it is expected that running jobs interactively by the users should be mainly for debugging purpose, all telnet sessions are served on the master node only and the maximum CPU time for each interactive background jobs will be limited to 15 minutes.

Batch Job Submission

For longer runs of program jobs that require more than two CPUs and longer processing time, they must be submitted as batch jobs through the PBS job queuing system.

Since the system is set up to support large computation jobs, the following maximum number of CPUs and maximum processing time are allowed for each batch job::

    - Maximum number CPUs  for each program job = 64 (i.e. 32 compute-nodes of 2 CPUs)
    - Maximum processing time for each program job = 10 Hours (wall clock time)

Furthermore, the job scheduling is set in such a fashion that higher priority will be given parallel jobs requiring a larger number of CPUs.

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4. Account Application Procedure

Users who would require the use of the new hpcpower.hku.hk system for their research projects, please apply for an account online by clicking on this link which would lead you through the application procedure.

For any enquiry, please contact the undersigned.

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Woo Chat Ming 
Tel: 2857 8632 
E-mail: cmwoo@cc.hku.hk