CIBR and other shared clusters

CIBR and a number of specific faculty have sponsored the purchase of several clusters managed for shared use by faculty. CIBR faculty may request moderate allocations for free, as a benefit of CIBR membership (which is free). Those requiring larger resources or dedicated time can participate in the purchase of future cluster equipment, and will get access to corresponding resources for the life of the cluster.

The 4 clusters currently in operation are:

Name

Cores

Storage

Purchased

Free CIBR Access

Paid Access

Notes

sphere.grid.bcm.edu

960

60 TB + 80 TB

2015

25,000 CPU-hr/qtr

Chiu, Barth, Guan, Waterland

prism.grid.bcm.edu

704

63+88 TB

2013

25,000 CPU-hr/qtr

Chiu, Barth, Wensel, Ludtke, Guan

torus.grid.bcm.edu

576+64

40+48+25 TB

2011-2012

10,000 CPU-hr/qtr

Chiu, Ludtke, Barth

Has 4 special 'bioinformatics' nodes with 16 cores and dedicated high performance storage.
Temporarily offline for reinstallation

asterix.grid.bcm.edu

180+42 GPUs

10 TB

2009-2011

None

Ludtke, Chiu

GPUs, special projects, NCMI personnel can contact Dr. Ludtke

Store

-

350 TB Raid6x2

2013

upon request

-

Reliable storage (backed up RAID6) for inactive data which will still be needed on the clusters. This storage array is available upon request to users of any of the clusters, but is directly accessible only from the clusters to discourage people for using it for general lab backup purposes. Please note that the primary active storage on each cluster is NOT backed up in any way. It is a RAID6 volume, which gives it good reliability, but every 4-5 years we experience some sort of failure.

Each cluster has independent user accounts, as different faculty contributed different amounts to each. Please click on one of the links above for detailed policies and procedures for each cluster

All of the clusters run some version of CentOS Linux. We do not provide any commercial software, but most standard open-source tools are installed, and users are welcome to install commercial or free software within their own accounts. BCM's site license for Matlab is usable on the cluster, but must be installed/licensed in the user's account. Contact Larry Mayran about this for details. We may also be able to install other software system-wide, if you have such a need, please ask.

Details on some of the open-source software we have made available for users is maintained on the Software page.

There is a CIBR Cluster Google Group/Mailing List (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cibrcluster) which is used for announcements of outages, problems, policy changes, etc. We strongly recommend all CIBR Cluster users join.

In manuscripts, grant proposals, presentations, and other publications, please acknowledge the assistance from the CIBR Center by including a statement similar to the following: "We gratefully acknowledge the assistance and computing resources provided by the CIBR Center for Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research of Baylor College of Medicine in the completion of this work."


CIBR recently hosted a Mini-Workshop on cluster computing. The slides can be downloaded here: workshop2015.pdf