The Elder Linux Cluster is a small distributed-memory multi-processor system. Each of the 12 nodes of the cluster contains one dual-core 3-GHz Intel Xeon EMT processors with 4096KB of cache and 32 GB of RAM (per node). The nodes are interconected with Gigabit Ethernet (60-110 Mbytes/sec bandwidth, 50-200 usecs latency). In the default queue, a maximum of 4 cpus may be used by a single user at at time, which can be spread over a maximum of 4 jobs. The maximum time permitted for a single job is 168 hours. The Elder Linux cluster is intended for large-memory jobs that cannot be run on the larger general-purpose Linux clusters. To support the large memory per node, its operating system and compilers operate in 64-bit mode. Consequently, applications must be compiled especially for this platform and the resulting binaries will not work on the other clusters, which still operate in 32-bit mode. The Elder Linux cluster uses ROCKS (www.rocksclusters.org) as its operating system and the Portable Batch System (PBS) software (www.pbspro.com) 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. The PBS User's Guide is online here
Obtaining
a Research Computing Account
Information about and criteria for obtaining research computing enabled
account to access the Elder Linux Cluster. If you already have a research computing enabled account, you should proceed to the tutorial below.
Getting Started Guide for New Users
A guide to running programs on the Elder Linux cluster using the
Portable Batch System (PBS) resource management software.
Elder Cluster Status
Ganglia Toolkit for displaying cluster load and status information.
PBS Documentation
PBS Pro User's Guide
PBS Pro User'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.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 Dogwood Linux cluster.