NC State HPC Partner Program

Researchers purchase compatible HPC hardware and any specialized or discipline-specific software licenses. NC State Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides space in an appropriate and secure operating environment, all necessary infrastructure (rack, chassis, power, cooling, networking), and the system administration and server support.

In return for infrastructure and services provided by OIT, when partner compute resources are not being used by the partner they are available to the general NC State HPC user community.

Partner Program Computational Hardware

Partner program hardware options are compatible with the general HPC hardware being operated by OIT. Compatible hardware allows limited systems staff to effectively support a large number of systems - since the systems effort required to manage the cluster increases very little with additional compatible hardware.

The hardware environment currently available for partners is:

• a distributed memory Linux cluster environment based on IBM/Lenovo Flex System hardware [Large memory nodes can be obtained to use as shared memory compute resources integrated into the henry2 cluster].

Distributed Memory Linux Cluster

Current partner Linux cluster compute nodes are Intel E5-2600v4 Xeon based. These compute nodes have two multicore processors (currently 12 core E5-2650 v4) and are typically configured with 128GB of memory and a SSD for operating system, swap, and local tmp space.

Partner cost for Linux cluster compute nodes is the actual cost of the node with three years of maintenance included. OIT provides chassis space and all other necessary infrastructure for 10Gb Ethernet connection to the henry2 cluster.

InfiniBand low latency interconnect options are available for partner compute nodes (with additional cost).

Management of Partner Compute Resources

The Linux cluster uses Platform LSF for resource management and scheduling. LSF fair share scheduling is used to provide equitable access to compute resources accounting for resources added by partners.

Partners have a dedicated LSF queue that provides access to their compute resources. Also, the LSF fair share value for partners reflects their participation in the overall resource. This allows partners to utilize their resources through their exclusive queue or to utilize general resources with a higher priority (based on fraction of overall resources owned by the partner).

All access to compute nodes is through LSF. Separate, shared login nodes provide access to all HPC compute resources.

Last modified: October 23 2016 12:40:13.