ITC Research Computing Support

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ITC Research Computing Support

• Series of talks designed to give you an
  introduction into the range of hardware,
  software, and support services available from ITC
  to enable and enhance your research endeavors.
• Overview, Hardware and Storage Today
• Mark Mc Keown and Tim Tolson
• Programming Languages Unix Commands, Tuesday
  9/11
• Statistical Software, Thursday, 9/13
• Mathematical/Visualization Software, Tuesday,
  9/18
• High Performance Computing, Thursday, 9/20
• Web Databases and Tools, Wednesday, 10/17 (This
  is our regular time for our BrownBag talks the
  third Wednesday of each month)

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ITC Computing Support

• ITCWeb web resource for help, information, etc.
  at www.itc.virginia.edu
• Researchers Portal specific to needs of
  researchers, see www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers
  
• Specific services, software, etc. listed under
  this portal at www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers/se
  rvices.html
• Instructional Technology Group (www.itc.virginia.e
  du/instructors)
• Includes Digital Media Lab provides equipment and
  support for digitizing and editing images, sound,
  and video.

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ITC Computing Support continued

• Software Central (www.itc.virginia.edu/central)
• provides web download area for software available
  to UVa faculty, staff, and students such as
  SecureCRT, Netscape, Norton AntiVirus, WinZip
• ITC Training (www.itc.virginia.edu/training)
• Computer workshops and training ranging from 2
  hour courses to multiple week courses and from
  Introduction to Word to Perl classes. Many
  available for free, others for small fee.
• DCI Program (www.itc.virginia.edu/dci)
• Program for purchasing PC and Mac computers that
  standardizes software builds, available models,
  etc. Voluntary program. Also available for
  personal purchases of Dell or Apple computers.
• Dial-in Access
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/netsys/dialin_ethernet
  _services/home.html

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ITC Academic Computing Health Sciences (ACHS)

• ACHS (www.med.virginia.edu/achs) Tom
  Spraggins, Manager
• technical consulting for the applications and
  hardware supported by ITC-ACHS to specialized
  consulting in areas such as molecular biology,
  health informatics, and data visualization.
• public computing laboratories for medical
  research and a teaching lab facility.
• located on the third floor of Hospital West (also
  known as the Multistory Building), around the
  corner from the elevators
• Open 830 AM to 500 PM.
• Telephone [phone] or e-mail
  itc-achs_at_virginia.edu.

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Other Research Support

• Office of the Vice President for Research and
  Public Service
• Office of Sponsored Programs conducting seminar
  on September 20 focussing on key components of
  doing research at U.Va. Details at
  www.virginia.edu/sponpgm or call Ms. Carole
  Wagonhurst at 924-6346
• Alderman Library (www.lib.virginia.edu)
• Electronic Centers (www.lib.virginia.edu/ecenters.
  html)
• Geospatial and Statistical Data Center (GeoStat)
  on 3rd floor of Alderman, 982-2630,
  (fisher.lib.virginia.edu)

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Research Computing Support

• Researchers Portal specific to needs of
  researchers, see www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers
  
• Specific services, software, etc. listed under
  this portal at www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers/se
  rvices.html
• Research Computing Support Center (RCSC)
• Phone [phone], Fax [phone]
• Hours 900 to 500 PM Monday through Friday,
  walk-in
• 4 full-time staff 3 with Ph.D., 4 student
  consultants
• E-mail support/consulting at Res-Consult_at_Virginia.
  EDU
• Software distribution for ITC site licensed
  packages.

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Research Computing Resources Available to UVa
Researchers

• blue.unix
• Unixlab Cluster
• IBM SP2
• Centurion
• NPACI/NSCA Resources
• Storage

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Learning Unix

• ITC Web Pages on Unix
• www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/unix/docs/home.html
• Books On Unix
• Learning the Unix Operating System by Jerry Peek
  et al.
• Unix Power Tools by Jerry Peek et al.
• manpages

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Unix Classes

• ITC Training Courses
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/training/student/progr
  amming.htm
• Linux/Unix Workshop - 44 class hours over 11
  days, cost 225
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/training/courses/spec-
  linux-unix.intro.html

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Connecting to the Unix machines

• Secure Shell ssh, slogin, scp
  www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/security/ssh.html
• Secure CRT
• www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/securecrt
• Exceed
• www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/unix/docs/exceed.
  html
• Exceed 3D

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blue.unix

• www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/unix/cluster/hom
  e.html
• Cluster of sixteen IBM RS/6000 machines running
  AIX 4.3
• General purpose Unix facility
• CPU limit of one hour for jobs
• Limited memory

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Unixlab Cluster SGI Workstations

• 7 SGI O2 workstations with 195Mhz R10000 CPUs and
  128MB
• 3 SGI O2 workstations with 300Mhz R12000 CPUs and
  256MB
• 3 SGI O200 servers with dual 180Mhz R10000 CPUs
  and 1GB

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Sun Workstations

• 15 Sun Ultra 60s with 450Mhz Ultra II CPUs and
  512MB
• 12 Sun Ultra 10s with 440Mhz Ultra IIi CPUs and
  512MB
• 6 Sun Ultra 10s with 333Mhz Ultra IIi CPUs and
  512MB
• 6 Sun Netras with 500Mhz Ultra IIe CPUs and 1GB

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Vendor Websites for Workstations

• Sun
• www.sun.com/desktop/products/Ultra10/
• www.sun.com/desktop/products/Ultra60/
• www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hw/networking/net
  rat/t200/index.html
• SGI
• www.sgi.com/o2/
• www.sgi.com/origin/200/

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• Unixlab CPU usage page
• www.people.virginia.edu/userv/usage.html
• No time limits
• Memory limit of 1GB physical limit on the
  machines
• Can be used for MPI parallel jobs

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IBM SP2

• www.itc.virginia.edu/research/sp2.html
• Cluster of 24 nodes with high speed interconnect
  for parallel processing
• 20 nodes with 160Mhz Power2SC CPUs with 512MB
• 4 nodes with 120Mhz Power2SC CPUs
• 2 nodes have 1GB of memory

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IBM SP2 (continued)

• Batch Queue System called Loadleveller
• Logins through splogin.sp2
• Users can have two jobs running at the same time
• Maximum of eight CPUs for parallel jobs
• Maximum time limit of 200 hours

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Centurion

• http//legion.virginia.edu/centurion/Centurion.htm
  l
• Large Linux cluster run by Computer Studies
  department for the Legion Project.
• 128 nodes with dual Pentium 400Mhz CPUs and 256MB
  per node.
• 128 nodes with 533Mhz Alpha 21164 CPUs and 128MB
  per node.
• 64 of the Alpha nodes use a High Speed Myrinet
  inter-connect.
• Jobs submitted through Legion or PBS batch
  system.

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National SuperComputer Centers

• NPACI - National Partnership for Advanced
  Computational Infrastructure.
• NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing
  Applications
• US researchers are eligible to apply for time on
  NCSA/NPACI machines.
• If application is successful time is free.
• Small allocations for 10,000 hours are relatively
  easy to get.

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• BlueHorizon 1152 IBM Power3 CPUs configured in
  144 nodes with 8 CPUs and 4GB per nodes based at
  San Deigo.
• http//www.npaci.edu/BlueHorizon/
• TeraScale Computing System 2728 1GHz Alpha CPUs
  configured in 682 nodes
• http//www.psc.edu/machines/tcs/
• Distributed Terascale Facility a 13.6 Teraflop
  Linux Cluster
• http//www.npaci.edu/teragrid/index.html

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• NPACI
• http//www.npaci.edu/
• NCSA
• http//www.ncsa.edu/
• NERSC National Energy Research Scientific
  Computing Center - (DoE funded research only)
• http//www.nersc.gov/

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Storage Facilites at UVa

• Home Directory Service
• /tmp and /bigtmp
• /longtmp
• HSM
• Other ITC supported Storage Options

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Home Directory Service

• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/homedir
• Researchers get 100Mb by default quotas may be
  increased on request by e-mailing
  accounts_at_virginia.edu
• Backed-up using Snapshot facility
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/homedir/snapsh
  ot.html
• Default file-system on blue.unix, Unixlab and SP2
  system
• The home directory service can be mapped to your
  PC or Mac so you can access your files directly
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/homedir/hdlo
  gin95.html
• http//www.itc.virignia.edu/unixsys/homdir/hdlog
  inmac.html

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/tmp and /bigtmp

• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/research/filestora
  ge
• Used for short time data storage time limit of
  24 hours for files before they are deleted.
• Can be accessed from blue.unix, SP2 and Unixlab.
• No quota but /bigtmp but the disk is only 2GB.

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/longtmp

• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/research/filestorage.h
  tml
• Two week limit on files in longtmp although in
  general users get longer.
• longtmp has a total space of 14GB.
• Users request their required space by sending an
  e-mail to res-consult.
• longtmp can be accessed from blue.unix, Unixlab
  and SP2.
• longtmp can also be mapped to your PC.
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/research/hsm.htmlmaps
  

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HSM-Hierarchial Storage Management System

• Large Tape system with a hard disk cache
• To use a file from the tape system it is
  necessary to insure that the file is moved to the
  disk cache
• cat file gt /dev/null

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HSM

• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/research/hsm.html
  
• Large Tape library multiple Terabytes of space.
• Should be used to archive files that are not used
  regularly.
• Although it is a tape-system, files are accessed
  in exactly the same way as any other disk based
  file-system .
• HSM can be mapped to your PC for direct access.
• http//www.itc.virginia.edu/research/hsm.htmlmaps
  
• Multiple copies of files are kept for data
  integrity.

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HSM-Requesting Space

• Request space by e-mailing
• res-consult_at_virginia.edu
• Post-grads usually have their space allocated
  within their supervisors directory space.
• Initial allocations are for 5GB with up to 20GB
  on request.

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Other ITC supported Storage Options

• Departmental file-systems can be exported to ITC
  machines users can then access their
  directories on their departmental machines
  directly from ITC computers.
• Departments can also buy additional disk wedges
  the cost is 63 for a 250MB wedge per year.

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Research Computing Support Group

• Guide you to the appropriate resources to run a
  long running or memory intensive program
• Recommend software for computer simulations of
  dynamical systems
• Provide computer workshops on supported software
  packages
• Assist you in using latex to write a journal or
  conference submission
• Help you to replicate a statistical analysis
  described in a journal article
• And much, much more please contact us, if we
  can't help we'll try to find someone who can

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Summary

• We provide broad range of computing support and
  services. We are here to help you get your
  research done.
• Next talk is Tuesday, Sept 11 on Programming
  Languages and Unix Commands and Tools, at Noon
  here.
• Questions, comments or concerns?