Introduction
The University of Huddersfield high performance computing grid comprises of several HPC/HTC resources spread around 3 counties in the North, North-West of England. Nick-named the Queensgate Grid (QGG) this system comprises of one dual boot Intel based cluster named Eridani, an AMD/Nvidia based cluster with GPUs and Large memory nodes named TauCeti, a 1000+ slot Condor Pool, a 120 Machine Backburner renderfarm (handling Mental Ray, 3DsMax, and Maya), a 48 Core UEC deployment for testing purposes and finally a share in an IBM iDataPlex system as part of the enCore cloud service.
System Configuration
The Linux end of the Eridani Cluster has been made openly available to the NGS VO. Eridani has 156 processing cores divided in 37 nodes and 16 Terabytes of storage space. Each node has 8 GB of main memory shared between the 4 cores. The cluster runs CentOS 5 x86_64 operating system, and the Torque middleware.
Users' home directories are shared across the cluster.
Up to 32 processors are available to a single parallel job. Jobs submitted to the batch system with a maximum duration longer than 48 hours will be rejected. Currently as a majority of our users are yet to migrate to the enCore service a maximum of 100 jobs can be queued by the NGS VO.
More information about the hardware configuration can be found here.
Middleware
The VDT toolkit is installed to allow users to manage jobs and transfer files across all NGS resources with a single sign-on or through the globus interface.
GSI-SSH is available for login on qgg.hud.ac.uk:2222
Globus Submission is available through qgg.hud.ac.uk/jobmanager-pbs
Users can also use GSIFTP to manage data by connecting to qgg.hud.ac.uk:2811 or use this address in the NGS portal.
Software
The Eridani cluster has the following softwares available for general use by the NGS:
- Blender
- Castep 5.0
- DL_Poly 2.14
- DL_Poly 2.20
- DL_Poly 3.10
- DL_Poly 4.01
- Gamess-uk 7.0
- Gulp 3.1
- HMMER 3.0
- LAMMPS 12Oct10
- OpenFOAM
The following compilers and MPI librareis etc are also available
- ATLAS 3.8.3
- BLAS Mar07
- BLAS May06
- CBLAS Feb03
- fftw 2.1.5
- fftw 3.2.2
- lapack 3.2.2
- MPI-LAM 7.1.4
- MPICH 1.2.7p1
- MPICH 2 1.2.1p1
- OpenMPI 1.4.1
- OpenMPI 1.5
These softwares can be used by loading modules. More information is available here.
Additional Software
There are certain pieces of additional software available to run on the system but are subject to licensing. Please contact the helpdesk for more information. The softwares are:
- Abaqus 6.9
- Amber 10.0
- Comsol 3.5a
- Comsol 4.0
- Comsol 4.0a
- Comsol 4.1
- Fluent 6.3.26
- Fluent 12.1.4
- Fluent 13
- Opera 3D 13.025
Additional Resources
Over time we will take steps to include the Condor Pool and the Windows HPC Server 2008R2 side of the Eridani cluster as an open resource on the NGS. If any project would like to test the systems before that an email to the helpdesk should get you started.
Contact
Any queries regarding the NGS at the University of Huddersfield should be submitted by email to the NGS support desk: support@grid-support.ac.uk
More Information
More information about the High Performance Computing activites at the University of Huddersfield can be found here and here.
