Introduction
The Spitfire-B Cluster at the University of Southampton provides access to a Cluster based on the Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003. The cluster allows various industrial and academic users to work on their problems and codes in collaboration with academics at Southampton on an HPC platform enabled by Windows Compute Cluster Server. It helps to build the community that uses technologies from Microsoft in their work.
System Configuration
The cluster consists of 64bit, 2.4 GHz dual-core AMD Opteron based machines that support a total of 104 independent processes, 200GB memory and 10TB storage space. The cluster runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack.Software installed on the cluster includes Python, Matlab, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Fluent, MS SQL Server 2005 and Windows Workflow Foundation.
Users' home directories are shared across the cluster.
Middleware, compilers and other software
The Spitfire-B cluster has deployed a standard Globus 2.4 based gateway so that registered NGS users may access the cluster through standard Globus services including GRAM, GridFTP and MDS. Users may submit jobs to the system using, for example,
% globusrun -r ccsgateway.soton.ac.uk/jobmanager-ccs '&(executable = path)'
% globusrun -f RSL_FILENAME -r ccsgateway.soton.ac.uk/jobmanager-ccs
Users can use GridFTP to access their home directory on ccsgateway.soton.ac.uk, which is mapped to the allocated non-backed up disk space on the cluster. Path of the home directory will be sent to the user once the application is approved.
Registered users are also able to log in to 2 public nodes (not included in the 104 compute nodes) through Remote Desktop to access tools and compilers which help them build applications that run on the Windows Cluster. These include Microsoft Visual Sudio 2005, Microsoft .NET SDK V2.0, Python 2.5, Matlab, and Fluent.
Contact
Any queries regarding the NGS at the University of Southampton should be submitted by email to the NGS support desk: support@grid-support.ac.uk, or directly to Professor Simon Cox
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