VPAC Systems Blog

Today we had another 29 compute nodes arrive..

..stacked and ready to rack!

We have now installed Abaqus 6.7-1 on Wexstan, this software will also be made available on the new large cluster, Tango, when it is commissioned.

Today we had the second of the three racks arrive for Tango. The first essential is to dispose of the packaging!

Because of the false floor in the VPAC machine room the rack has to be pushed up a purpose built ramp by a couple of handy press-ganged volunteers.

It then needs to turn past Wexstan…

…to go down the central corridor past Edda…

…to its temporary home whilst Tango is assembled.

Busy day today for Tango, first we had the rest of our first batch of 27 nodes arriving ready for racking.

Xenon then unpacked them..

…and racked them.

So now we have 25 nodes racked (the other two are being used for familiarisation work by VPAC) and ready to be joined by their compatriots in the near future.

The new VPAC cluster, Tango, an AMD Opteron cluster purchased from Xenon Systems and using InfiniBand as its interconnect has started to arrive from the vendor.

This is the first of the 3 racks for the new cluster to arrive, ready for the components of the cluster to be inserted.

Here you can see the management node and the first two compute nodes to arrive as VPAC start to configure them for use.

This is the InfiniBand switch that will be the heart of the cluster for parallel programs using MPI.

Here is the systems managers office, full of nodes waiting to be put into the above rack!

Brecca is due to be retired to be replaced by a nice new cluster of AMD Opteron machines called “Tango”.

Currently we are expecting to retire Brecca on the weekend of the 11th August as that is the date of power work in the machine room to support the new power and cooling for the new cluster. All VPAC machines will need to be shut down that weekend.

We are currently waiting for confirmation from RMIT of that date, but we have put a reservation on to prevent *any* jobs starting now that would still be running on the 11th. Shorter jobs will still run. Jobs that were already started and have not finished will sadly need to be killed.

Remember that a VPAC account lets you access any of the academic clusters at VPAC (Brecca, Wexstan and Edda at present) and that your files are independent of the clusters, so Brecca going away won’t change your data and you will see the same files whichever cluster you login to.