May 2003 - New Cycle Server and Cluster

• Hagar Compute Server - A new Aspen Systems Linux compute server named hagar.cs.indiana.edu is now available to all faculty, staff, and graduate students. This is a dual processor system with 3.06GHz Intel Xeon processors and 4GB of memory running RedHat Linux 8.0. Hagar is a great place to run your CPU-intensive compiles and jobs and anyone with a CS Sharkestra account automatically has an account on this system.

• Thor Linux Cluster - A new 8-node Aspen Systems Linux cluster and Storage Area Network (SAN), purchased as part of a $2.1M NSF Research Infrastructure grant, is now available. The head node of the cluster is named thor.cs.indiana.edu and the 8 cluster nodes are named thor1 - thor8. Access to the cluster is granted by sponsorship of any of the faculty principle investigators (PIs) on the grant. Requests for accounts on thor should be emailed to accounts-admin.

  Each of the cluster nodes are dual processor systems with 2.8GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2GB of memory running RedHat Linux 8.0. They are connected to the SAN via a 2Gbps Qlogic SANBlade 2300 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter. Myrinet connectivity will be available shortly and we are also planning to implement InfiniBand and Quadrics. The SAN includes a 16-port, 2Gbps Qlogic SANBox2 Fibre Channel switch and 2.2TB of data storage utilizing the Mylex FFx-2 Fibre Channel RAID controller.

  The SAN storage on the thor cluster is divided up as follows:

  • The /san/shared partition is mounted on the head node (thor) and accessible using the same path (/san/shared) via NFS from each of the cluster nodes (thor1-thor8). This partition is approximately 1TB.

  • There are locally mounted /san/local partitions on the cluster nodes thor1-thor7. These partitions are approximately 100GB each and are only accessible on the local node. Please note that thor8 does not currently have a /san/local partition due to a limitation of the current linux kernel. Only 8 LUNs are accessible by the linux kernel so this means that only the shared partition and 7 local partitions can be seen by linux, making the 8th local partition (LUN 9) inaccessible on thor8. We hope to have this problem resolved with a future version of the Linux kernel.

  If you need access to space on the SAN, please just let us know.

  Please note that none of the SAN storage on the thor cluster is backed up. As a result, you are urged not to store any data on the SAN that cannot be easily recreated or obtained from other sources. If you have critical data on the SAN, a hardware failure or accidental removal will result in your data being lost forever.

Please see the related FAQ entry and the facilities overview for more information about the computing resources available within the CS Department.

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