UIT acquires testing environment for research cluster to improve quality of service

In December 2009, UIT completed the acquisition and implementation of a new testing environment for the Tufts high-performance computing research cluster. This testing environment includes a head node, a management node and 2 computing nodes absolutely identical to the ones in the production research cluster.
This new testing environment will allow our team supporting high-performance computing at Tufts to deliver a more reliable service with improved quality as settings are better tuned up and new features are released in the production environment. Since its inception, the new testing cluster has allowed us to test communication settings to improve the performance of our fiber link between the Tufts research cluster and the Center for Scientific Visualization. It has also allowed us to debug issues with MPI in support of parallel computing. Finally, it has allowed us to test improved LDAP authentication to allow for a more secure experience on the Tufts research cluster.