The Lyceum Linux Teaching Cluster Service

The Linux teaching cluster, Lyceum, is a service providing a powerful Linux High Performance Computing facility. It is targetted at undergraduate and MSc student projects which require substantially greater computational power or memory than is available on the Windows workstations. It is particularly designed to provide for projects where the number or length of runs required is impractical on individual PCs. Research postgraduates and staff users will normally find that their research computing needs are better met on the larger Iridis research cluster, which is not available for teaching use.  

Project/Course tutors who would like their students to have access to Lyceum should send a request to ServiceLine with a list of usernames. Individual students should get their tutor to submit a request to Serviceline on their behalf. 

Hardware

The Cluster is accessed via a powerful head node with 16 processor-cores and 64 GB of RAM. This can be accessed interactively and used as a gateway to a further 21 compute nodes, each with 8 processor-cores and at least 16GB of memory (a cluster node is an individual computer). The original 16 compute nodes use 2.3 GHz AMD quad-core "Barcelona" processors. Four of these have 32GB of memory. A further 5 compute nodes with 3GHz Intel 'Harpertown' processors and 32 GB of memory were added in 2010. The peak performance of the system is almost 2 TFlops (2 million million floating point operations per second!)

Operating System and Job Control

The operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.2. Generically Linux is an open source version of the Unix operating system. If users are not already familiar with UNIX/Linux operating systems they will need be prepared to acquire a basic knowledge. In practice this is not usually too big a problem, as with software packages such as Fluent, Ansys or Matlab, the GUI will look the same as it does under Windows.

Smaller, shorter jobs can be run on the head node in a multi-user environment. When a user needs to scale up to running larger or longer jobs, or to run several jobs at once, jobs can be submitted to run on the compute nodes via a batch queue system.  This allocates exclusive access to the node to the user for the duration of their jobs. Job scheduling policies are designed to prevent domination of the system by a small group of users. Example job templates are available for common software packages, to assist with submitting batch jobs to the compute nodes. So, often, all that is required to get started is the use of a GUI-based text editor and the use of a simple command to submit a job.