The Quarry Cluster
IU's Newest Supercomputer
Indiana University's newest supercomputer, Quarry, goes into production service on Monday, August 20th. The 7 Teraflop Quarry system replaces the 2 Teraflop AVIDD system, which is being retired.Like AVIDD, Quarry is built from Intel processors and runs Red Hat Linux as its operating system, and uses TORQUE (PBS) and Moab for job management. When the retirement of AVIDD was discussed at the Research Technologies Round Table in January, it became clear that many researchers preferred to continue working in that familiar environment, rather than migrating to the more powerful Big Red cluster. To meet the needs of these ongoing research programs, the Quarry cluster was commissioned.
Quarry consists of 112 IBM HS21 Blade servers, each containing two Intel Xeon 5335 quad-core processors, 8GB of memory, a 36GB locally-attached SAS disk for local scratch space, and gigabit ethernet for system interconnects. The Blade configuration provides electrical power and cooling advantages which makes Quarry much more cost-effective than AVIDD, while occupying much less space.
The user environment is generally similar to AVIDD's, but the Softenv environment management system is used on the Quarry cluster, to simplify application and environment configuration. When you login to Quarry for the first time, a file named .soft will be created for you, defining system defaults, such as Intel's C/C++ and Fortran compilers. Additional packages may be added, using the Nano editor (a Pico-lookalike); to get a list of the possibilities, enter the command softenv.
Please contact the High Performance Systems group hps-admin@iu.edu for system specific questions. To get help migrating applications or code optimization contact the High Performance Applications group hpa-admin@.edu.
