LaPalma Supercomputer to be busy during the 2nd period, 2008
On the 1st June, 2008 the second period of 2008 starts for
LaPalma supercomputer.
The way to apply for high-priority time at LaPalma for this period was to send an
application form with details of the resources requested. The response was very
large, and demand far surpassed the available resources, so the Access Committee
had no option but to make cuts and grant less time than requested. Overall
statistics for this period are: total number of
available CPUhours:
around 260.000; total number of
requested CPUhours: 708.000;
number of projects applying for time at LaPalma: 11. LaPalma is the biggest
supercomputing resource at the IAC. If you have any questions regarding the
use of LaPalma (or the other supercomputing resources), please do not hesitate
to get in touch with us.
SIE Users Committee
After the last SIENews issue, two new meetings of the SIE Users Committee have taken place.
The
March
and
April
minutes are available at SIE webpage. Among the many topics discussed, and closed and new actions,
we can highlight the following:
- SIC7, one of the laptops for loans, now has a permanent, node-locked IDL license.
It will be useful for those of you who are on travel, must use IDL, and can not get
a license through ssh tunneling, VPN, the local site, or otherwise.
- A proposal has been submitted to buy a new, larger and central screen to be placed in
the Aula, and a new projector. This will complement, not replace, the present set-up.
Please note that now the Research Area is in charge of the "Aula",
while the SIC is in charge of projectors, sound system, etc. (see
http://goya/PAGINA-INTERNA/comites/cd/cd2008/Inf11-08.pdf).
- Now everybody in the Research and Graduate Studies Divisions is receiving
mails sent to the iac mailing list through the astros-iac list.
This solves the long-standing problem of several researchers missing from
the iac list.
Xerenade and PGI compilers
If you need a cluster for tests, you can now use our new mini-cluster
Xerenade.
This mini-cluster has 16 AMD CPUs, and should be perfect for code
development. This is not yet in full production, but if you would be
interested in trying it out, please do get in touch. Perhaps the news
about the new installed compiler has gone unnoticed, but we have recently
installed in the IAC network the
C/C++
and
Fortran
Portland Group's compilers. For those of you developing
parallel codes, it is interesting to know that this compiler supports
"
High Performance
Fortran (HPF)".
New B/W and color printers
The two color printers placed next to the CAU office have been recently
replaced by newer ones, as their maintenance contract had expired.
However, the two old printers apparently still work fine: one has been
relocated in the 2nd corridor (
lwc4), the other in the
South Wing (
lwc5). Also, the South Wing has got two new B/W
printers (
lw37 and
lw38). Finally, three
new B/W printers have been bought to replace some old printers in the
Research Division (
lw4,
lw11 and
lw28). They should hopefully arrive and be installed
shortly.
SIEpedia article on Data Backup
Those of you who have attended Ruyman's seminar have certainly noticed the
huge amount of data he has been working with. Losing such data is not an
option, so Ruyman has devised a scheme to make automated backup copies,
running daily, from one disk to another. He has been so kind as to share
his recipe by publishing an article on the SIEPedia:
Automated
Disk Backup.
We also remind you about the
Network Area Storage (aka
Sistema
de Almacenamiento Masivo), details of which you can find in the
Almacenamiento Masivo talk given last
December by Justo and Antonio. After all projects that have bought space or
applied for it have been allocated the space they requested, there will
likely still be some spare capacity available. However, projects needing
large data areas (say upward of 0.5TB) ought to think about buying
additional storage modules.
How do we install software?
Installing and upgrading astronomical software is one of the staple
activities of the SIE. As you know, we install packages in our software
servers, and each machine
mounts the software from the appropriate
directory in the appropriate server (type mount to see what this means).
Installing software in a central server is a process somewhat longer and more
involved than just downloading and installing an rpm in a single machine.
In this
SIEpedia
article we describe shortly the software installation steps.