The UL HPC platform is composed of 5 clusters:

Clusters organization

Each cluster is organized according to the following generic scheme:

Download the PDF

× General Organization of UL HPC cluster

As can be seen, our clusters consist of:

• a front-end server access-*.uni.lu that serves as an interface and access point to the cluster
• an adminfront server, which is only relevant for the management team. It hosts as many VMs (under the Xen hypervisor) as there are services to operate the cluster
• a shared storage area, based on NFS and, in somes cases, Lustre, which permit the sharing of data across the cluster
• a set of computing nodes which can be reserved and used for a given period of time by the users of the cluster via the OAR batch scheduler.
• a fast interconnect topology that establishes high performance communication between the cluster elements

Hardware Overview

All clusters feature Intel processors, under the following micro architectures (newest to oldest):

• Intel Xeon Broadwell
• Intel Xeon Haswell
• Intel Xeon Ivybridge
• Intel Xeon Sandybridge
• Intel Xeon Westmere

Operating Systems

Each computing node runs the Centos Linux operating system, version 7 (or Debian Linux in the case of Chaos, Gaia and G5K) and you’ll have to interface with them by using the command line.

Thus, you are more than encouraged to become familiar - if not yet - with Linux commands. We can recommend the following sites and resources:

• Linux Command
• Linux/Unix 1 page command reference