Over the past three years UIT has observed an increasing demand for our High-Performance Computing research cluster. In anticipation of the ongoing need for additional resources, we are very proud to announce that UIT will be increasing Tufts’ HPC capacity to over 1000 cores in early September. The new cluster capacity will be more than triple the size of the cluster we acquired three years ago.
In addition to increasing our capacity, we will make the following changes:
• The cluster network interconnect will change from InfiniBand to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
• Several computing nodes will have 96GB of RAM for memory-intensive jobs.
• Experimental GPU research environment will be added for exploration of alternate parallel computing methods.
This upgrade is both complicated and extensive. As a result, there are two phases for the changes that will unfold during the month of August.
Phase 1, in progress, will bring the newly-acquired IBM hardware into a production ready configuration. Once the new cluster is fully configured and running, we will switch from our legacy cluster to this new environment in a transparent manner to cluster users.
Phase 2 will start on August 15 and will consist of powering off the legacy cluster to change the network interconnect. During Phase 2, the new cluster will be available through the same processes as the legacy cluster. As the hardware changes to the legacy cluster are completed, the number of cores available will increase. Priority will be given to faculty-contributed nodes during this process, and we anticipate full completion by early September.
If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them via email to cluster-support@tufts.edu.