Torus Policy

updated 12/03/2013

Overview

Torus is a medium-scale high performance linux cluster purchased by a collaborative arrangement between CIBR, and the Ludtke, Chiu and Barth 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 5,000,000 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 10,000 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

Unlike our previous collaborative clusters, Torus is equipped with a QDR Infiniband interconnect, capable of very high bandwidth transfers between nodes. This, in turn, is used to provide a shared Lustre scratch disk to all of the nodes. By drawing 1 TB of storage from each node, this scratch filesystem can provide 48 TB of scratch space accessible to all nodes with similar performance to a local drive.

Software Configuration

Detailed Information on Using the Cluster

For Assistance

Contact

SysOp: Dwight Noel dwight.noel@bcm.edu

Last modified on Dec 3, 2013