SIEminar: "Using the IAC Chimera Cluster", by
Ángel de Vicente, Wednesday 23 May 12:30
As you probably know from our
previous
newsletter, the IAC Beowulf cluster is now called
Chimera, and it is made up of 32
bits and 64 bits (EM64T) compute machines (a total of 64 processors). When
compared to the old Beoiac cluster, it also has some interesting features,
like a Parallel File System (PVFS2), the Modules package to easily modify
your environment, etc. The idea of this SIEminar is to briefly discuss this
new environment and allow current or prospective users to find out how they
can use it, and also to discuss problems or improvement suggestions that
they might have regarding the cluster.
SIE's Web goes public!
The SIE's own website has moved to the external IAC Web:
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/SINFIN.
The SIEpedia too has been relocated on the external Web server:
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/siepedia (we
also plan to publish the Chimera Web as soon as it's ready). So our websites
are now accessible from outside the IAC, thus to colleagues on travel, to collaborators
from other Institutes, and to anybody looking for info on astronomical software.
We have taken some safety measures:
- Email directions are obfuscated with javascript to avoid being collected by harvesting bots.
- Access to sensitive parts of the SINFIN site, such as internal documents,
SIENews, Minutes of the (R.I.P) SIE Users Committee etc. are restricted to IAC
machines through an IP-filtering php script.
Websites made in SIE
Looking back, we realize that at the SIE we have developed a good number of
websites for the Research and Graduate Studies Areas. In addition to the Research,
MultiMedia Service and own SIE (now external) internal pages, we built made
all websites for the meetings and workshops organized by the Research Area.
Our philosophy is to create simple, accesible and attractive pages using
web
standards. Please visit our
dossier to
learn more about our web development activity.
Tips for not saturating your home and mail quotas
If you think that SIE staff are so experienced and computer savvy that
saturating their home or Inbox quota is an event as likely as Harry Potter
showing up in the Aula in the middle of a colloquium, well, you will be
disappointed. We have all passed through the shame of finding our home
directory completely full, or being unable to receive mail messages because
there was no space left in our mail Inbox. In our most recent
SIEpedia
article we offer some tips on how to check your home and email quota, and
how to avoid filling them up.
Software packages upgrades
Recently, we have updated the following software packages:
Bazaar
to v0.15;
Cloudy
to v07.02;
GSL
to v1.9;
Kile
to v1.9.3;
LyX
to v1.4.4;
WCSTools
to 3.6.8;
Eric3
to v3.9.4;
Gifsicle
to v 1.48;
Grace
to v5.1.28;
HEAsoft
to v6.2;
R to
v2.4.1;
Specview
to v1.24;
Yacas
to v1.0.63. Also,
Starlink
has been updated to version "Hokulei", and
GAIA
to v3.3-7.
We would like to remind that all software updates are duly announced in the
SIE HomePage, while a
complete list of all software updates since the SIE was created can be seen
in
SIE
activities.