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Rendering of a rapidly spinning, gravitational-wave emitting newborn neutron star. Simulation: Ott et al. 2007 Rendering: Ralf Kaehler ZIB/AEI/KIPAC 2007
This month CACR has installed and configured a new cluster in the Powell-Booth Laboratory for Computational Science. This system is specifically configured to meet the applications needs of Caltech’s Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity (TAPIR) group in the Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy Division.
The MRI2 cluster is funded by an NSF MRI-R2 award with matching funds from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.The configuration, integrated by Hewlett-Packard and CACR’s operations team, consists of 1536 Intel X5650 compute cores in 128 dual Westmere hex-core nodes equipped with a total of ~3 TB of memory, connected via QDR InfiniBand (IB). It includes 100 TB of high-performance, high-reliability disk space access via IB through a Panasas rack.
The research project using the new cluster, Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes: Facilitating LIGO and Enabling Multi-Messenger Astronomy, is led by Professor Christian Ott. The co-Investigators on the MRI award are Dr. Mark Scheel of TAPIR and CACR’s director, Dr. Mark Stalzer. The research will explore the dynamics of spacetime curvature, matter, and radiation at high energies and densities. Central project aspects are the simulation of black hole binary coalescence, neutron-star — black hole inspiral and merger, and the collapse of massive stars leading to core-collapse supernovae or gamma-ray bursts. Key results will be the prediction of gravitational waveforms from these phenomena to enable LIGO gravitational wave searches and to facilitate the extraction of (astro-)physics from observed signals.
The MRI2 cluster is named Zwicky, in honor of Caltech Astrophysics Professor Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), who discovered supernovae and who was the first to explain how supernovae can be powered by the collapse of a massive star into a neutron star. Zwicky also discovered the first evidence for dark matter in our universe, proposed to use supernovae as standard candles to measure distances in the universe, and suggested that galaxy clusters could act as gravitational lenses.
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CACR’s support staff will be observing Institute holidays and special release days, Dec 25 to Jan 3. During the break, we’ll periodically check e-mail but primarily be watching for support issues of critical nature. Jan 4, we are back to full staff/regular support operations. Wishing you all a peaceful Holiday season!
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Important Information for SHC Users
As of Sept 8, 2009, SHC has been transitioned to the new sw stack (RHEL+OpenIB). There are currently 115 core4 nodes and 65 core8 nodes, in production. For more information, please visit the SHC Getting Started / System Guide.
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Important Information for SHC Users
Over the next couple of days, more backend nodes from shc-a will be transitioned to shc-[c,new]’s cluster of backend nodes, running the new software stack. By Sept 4, there will be just 24 shc-a backend nodes, all the rest of the compute nodes will be running the new software stack, seen from shc-[new,c].
- Please port your codes to the new software environment if you’ve not already done so!
- Please report any porting problems you’re having; we’ll help asap.
- Details on how to rebuild your code for the new SHC environment can be found here
- Your MPI based code must be rebuilt for the new and improved shc software stack.
Preventive Maintenance on Sept 8 from 0800 to 1400 will encompass testing the complete transition of SHC compute and head node resources to the upgraded software stack environment. The fully upgraded production SHC cluster configuration will be two head nodes (shc-[a,b]) and 1180 Opteron compute node cores (163 dual cpu/dual core + 66 dual cpu/quad core).
Questions or concerns about the upgrade? Just let us know.
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CACR’s 163 node Shared Heterogeneous Cluster (SHC) has recently expanded by an additional 20 nodes. Each of these new nodes contains 16 GB of memory and have two quad-core, 2.5 GHz AMD Opteron Processors (model 2380). As with the existing SHC nodes, each of the new nodes is connected via Infiniband to CACR’s Infiniband Switch.
The SHC provides computing capabilities specifically configured to meet the needs of applications from Caltech’s PSAAP, Turbulent Mixing, Applied and Computational Mathematics, and Numerical Relativity communities. For more information about the SHC, including information for test users of the new nodes, see this page.
