The compute component of Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility (ECDF), known as Eddie, offers a number of services aimed to satisy as best as possible all researchers' computational requirements. Compute Facilities available Why Use Eddie Eddie can cut the time taken to compute problems by running the software in parallel, or by breaking the problem into many pieces, each of which can be run on a separate cpu in parallel. Examples of the speed improvements that researchers have realised already are in Psychiatry, where processing of brain scans from a Schizophrenia study took 28 hours instead of 469 days, and a protein structure prediction study which involved 810,000 simulations and used 1.5 CPU years of computation in less than 2 days. Eddie Linux Compute Cluster Eddie is a standard compute cluster with 128 nodes with two dual core CPUs and 118 worker nodes with two quad core CPUs. 58 nodes are connected with Infiniband fast interconnect to enable distributed memory MPI jobs to run. Eddie and the ECDF GPGPU Service GPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units. There are currently four NVIDIA GPGPU cards in use which can be programmed using Cuda or OpenL .Cuda is a toolkit for GPGPU written by NVIDIA. OpenCL is a new industry standard programming system for developing parallel programs that typically execute on heterogeneous computing systems. More information about using Cuda and OpenCL is available from the links below. GPU Hardware description and Cuda Quick Start page OpenCL quick start page Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) and Large Memory Systems Up to 16GB of memory on an Eddie node can be accessed by shared memory programs using methods such as OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing). The next phase of Eddie will contain nodes with more memory. Steps to run an OpenMP job on Eddie Data Services File services At present ECDF does not yet offer any general file services such as NAS (Network Attached Storage). However, high performance fibre channel storage is available for use with the cluster and may be accessed from a user's workstation. Some groups use this as general storage. Plans for NAS Services Compute cluster data services Eddie is connected to a large amount of high performance fibre channel storage which can be accessed from a user workstation. ECDF Filesystem overview Version Control Services The Version Control Service is a standard central Subversion repository. Version Control Service Backup services ECDF storage can be backed up. A monthly cycle of complete backup and a weekly incremental backup is used. ECDF will also provide a backup service for research group servers. Support Services ECDF can offer support for researchers wishing to make best use of computational and data resources within their research including services below. Middleware Support Middleware Support available Cluster application support Full list of available software Application support New users who do not belong to groups already using the ECDF should email IS.helpline@ed.ac.uk with a message subject ECDF New User. A member of the ECDF Team will visit them to discuss their potential use and how the ECDF Team can help. The ECDF team are very willing to provide advice with failing programs or in optimising existing applications. Please contact IS.helpline@ed.ac.uk Getting started on ECDF Form to apply for an account Form to request guranteed time Form to request storage Quickstart Guide Related Links ECDF Wiki Home page ECDF Service Definition ECDF Charges This article was published on 2024-10-08
