Prism Policy

updated 12/32/2013

Overview

Prism is a medium-scale high performance linux cluster purchased by a collaborative arrangement between CIBR, and the Chiu, Barth, Wensel, Ludtke and Guan labs. Each group that contributed financially to the purchase of the cluster is entitled to a proportional amount of the overall compute capacity of the cluster. In theory, the cluster can provide up to 6,170,000 CPU-hr of computation annually, however, it is impossible to keep such a cluster fully loaded all of the time, and typical clusters run at ~60-80% of capacity, and allocations reflect this.

CIBR faculty can acquire time allocations on this cluster simply by requesting them via email to sludtke@bcm.edu. Initial allocations of 25,000 CPU-hr do not require any formal application, simply a request. The request must come from the PI, not students/postdocs, as allocations are made on a per-faculty basis, and the professor must decide how to allocate the time among people in his/her lab. Faculty must be members of CIBR to receive free time on the cluster (membership is free). If the initial allocation is exhausted, larger allocations may be possible, depending on usage levels, and the number of requests in that quarter.

Hardware & Software

Prism is equipped with a QDR Infiniband interconnect, capable of very high bandwidth transfers between nodes.

Software Configuration

Detailed Information on Using the Cluster

For Assistance

Contact

SysOp: Dwight Noel dwight.noel@bcm.edu

Last modified on Feb 22, 2013