Computer Science Department News

Systems group has set up a new server for research and student computing. This configuration implements resource aggregation of two physical machines and presents a single Virtual Machine that runs on top of the two hosts.

Physical configuration:

2 x Dell PowerEdge R910:
CPU: 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X7560 @ 2.27GHz. 8 physical
cores per CPU = 32 cores per physical machine
RAM: 512 GB
40Gbps QDR Infiniband Interconnect

Virtual configuration (smp.cs.odu.edu):

CPU: 64 physical cores at 2.27 GHz. No hyperthreading enabled
Memory: 490GB

File Systems for Research Utilization:

/scratchspace - 233GB xfs file system
/dev/shm - 234GB tmpfs file system
/ramfs - 234GB ramfs file system
/mnt/hugetlbfs - hugetlbfs
/scratchspace is hard disk storage on both physical nodes, while the other three file systems are RAM-based. Best practices are running I/O intensive code directly from the RAM based file system

Access:

SSH to smp.cs.odu.edu with your Unix credentials.

Running Code

In order to achieve optimal results from an applications, one must use custom scripts to run specific code. We have provided a list of scripts that can be used for the majority of research applications. The scripts are located in /opt/ScaleMP/examples. These scripts cover jobs that utilize MPICH1, MPICH2, OpenMPI, MKL, OpenMP, Pthread, Serial, or Throughput characteristics. We have also provided detailed guidelines that can be viewed at http://cs.odu.edu/SMP_Application_Execution_Guidelines.pdf

MPICH1/MPICH2

MPICH1/2 have been installed in /opt/ScaleMP/

Please let us know if you have any more questions and email root@cs.odu.edu