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ITCWeb: Research Computing Support on the Aspen Cluster ITC Aspen Linux Cluster

The Aspen Linux Cluster is a 48 node distributed memory multi-processor system. Each node of the cluster contains two 1.53 GHz AMD Athlon K7 MP processors with 256KB of cache (per cpu) and 1 GB of RAM (per node). The nodes are interconected with Gigabit Ethernet (60-110 Mbytes/sec bandwidth, 50-200 usecs latency). The Aspen Linux cluster uses Red Hat Linux version 7.2 as its operating system and the Portable Batch System (PBS) software to distribute the computational workload across the nodes. PBS is a batch job scheduling application that provides the facility for building, submitting and processing both serial and parallel batch jobs on the cluster. At the present time, a single user may have jobs running on a maximum total of 24 processors at once.

Obtaining a Research Computing Account
Information about and criteria for obtaining research computing enabled account to access the Aspen Linux Cluster. If you already have a research computing enabled account, you should proceed to the tutorial below.

Tutorial for New Users
A tutorial for how to run programs on the Aspen Linux cluster using the Portable Batch System (PBS) resource management software.

Aspen Cluster Status
Ganglia Toolkit for displaying cluster load and status information.

Aspen Queue Status
Displays jobs in the queue. Click on the link for a given job ID to get complete information about that job.

PBS Documentation

PBS Pro User's Guide

PBS Pro Adminstrator's Guide

Available Software

PGI Compilers
Portland Group Fortran 77/90 and C/C++ compilers for Linux. Also the PGI graphical debugger and performance profiler.

Intel Compilers
Intel Fortran 77/90 and C/C++ compilers for Linux.

MPI
The Message Passing Interface Libraries for parallel computing.

TotalView Debugger
A graphical debugger for both serial and parallel applciations written in C/C++ and Fortran 77/90.

IMSL F90 MP Libraries
The IMSL numerical libraries are a collection of over 1000 Fortran (F90 and F77) routines that implement algorithms useful in mathematical and statistical analysis.

Research Computing Software Environments
ITC licenses the Linux version of most of its mathematical and statistical software environments including Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, IDL, SAS, and S-Plus. For long running, computation intensive tasks, these environments can be run in batch mode on the Aspen Linux cluster.

Related Links

The Beowulf Project

Robert Brown's Beowulf Webpage