Our users who normally perform numerically-intensive research calculations in their work will be happy to note that those calculations which previously required a supercomputer can now be carried out on relatively inexpensive clusters of commodity off-the-shelf PCs!
Thanks to Academic and Research Computing, a small cluster consisting of eight Intel PCs running Red Hat Linux was recently built in the VCC machine room, and it is now available for researchers to use. Each node within the cluster has dual 866MHz Pentium III processors, 512MB of RAM, and access to 18GB of shared disk space. Users can use the ssh (secure shell) utility to connect to a node we have designated for interactive work, or submit production batch jobs using the batch queueing system DQS. MPICH has also been installed, allowing the cluster to run parallel jobs that pass messages using the Message Passing Interface library MPI.
In addition to the Linux cluster, ARC continues to offer its popular NIC batch processing service for serial jobs on several UNIX workstations.
If you are a new research user, or if you are already a NIC batch user and want to access the Linux cluster as well, just complete a Batch Services Access Request Form and bring it to the VCC Help Desk. To get a form, or to get more information about the batch services, please see the webpage located at http://www.rpi.edu/dept/cis/nic/html/nic-intro.html, or contact Mike Kupferschmid by calling ext. 6558 or by sending electronic mail to kupfem@rpi.edu.
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