CSAR Bulletin issued in November 2004

Newton Expansion

The next stage of the Newton expansion will take place on the morning of 30th November. The work will combine the current 64 processor nodes (newt64a, b, c and i) to form a 256 processor single system image (SSI). Newton will be unavailable during this time. Once complete Newton will comprise two 256 processor SSI's with 1 Terabyte of memory. As a result of the changes to Newton the interactive node is now newtd. The final stage of the expansion will see the re-housing of the Altix machines where the remaining nodes will be combined to form a 512 processor SSI. For further details of the expansion to the Newton service, please see: http://www.csar.cfs.ac.uk/about/news/newton_news.shtml

New Queue For Faster 1.5 GHz Processors On Newton

The new additional 128 processors recently added to Newton are 1.5 GHz Intel Itanium 2 chips with 6 Megabytes of tertiary cache compared to the original set of chips which were 1.3 GHz processors with 3 Megabytes of tertiary cache. In order to allow specific access to these faster processors the newt15 queue has been set up. You will need to add the following line to your batch script in order to use them #BSUB -q newt15. Please note that usage of these processors is charged at 10% above the 1.3 GHz processor rate. Most feedback on the use of these processors has indicated that jobs run more than 10% faster on the new processors.

Intel Compiler Upgrade

Version 8.1 of the Intel compilers have been upgraded to the latest release, build 8.1.021 (Fortran) and 8.1.024 (C++). The previous version has been moved to the 8.1_previous area, and can be accessed by loading the module 8.1_previous. Please see the documentation directory in /opt/Modules/cmplrs/intel/8.1/doc for any Intel notified differences in this update.

Default MIPSpro Compiler on The Origins

On Monday the 22nd November we will be changing the default version of the MIPSpro compiler. The current one (version 7.3.1.2) will be replaced by version 7.4. Version 7.3.1.2 will remain on the system and users can keep this as their default by adding the following command to their start up files module switch MIPSpro MIPSpro7312