What is the CRUG Cluster?
One of the goals of Carleton’s Computational Research Users Group is to create a shared, powerful, and expandable computation cluster that is usable by as many of our users as possible and funded by grants and faculty startup funds. Our users include faculty and students from all departments, and their needs are diverse.
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The system is designed to take advantage of the SLURM workload manager. We expect that the majority of the jobs will take advantage of multiple cores through some type of parallel processing. 95% of our needs seem to be embarrassingly parallel. Users “ssh” into command.dmz.carleton.edu and submit slurm jobs through the linux command line. An example of using SLURM can found at https://wiki.carleton.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=57837534. Some useful SLURM commands can be found at https://wiki.carleton.edu/display/carl/Useful+slurm+commands. If you are new to this, please contact our technical staff for help.
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Yes, we support this too. You can run graphical jobs by X-Forwarding them to your desktop. Mathematica and Rstudio desktop client are good examples of this. However, please limit your core usage for these types of jobs to one or two cores. If you need more than two cores, then you need to submit your jobs through slurm, so that the load gets distributed to the compute nodes. If that isn’t an option, you can reserve a compute node via slurm, and then use it to run your graphical app; please contact our technical staff for help.
More information about X forwarding can be found at:
Who gets access to the system?
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Please find funding. We will happily add the new resources, and you will have priority use on the resources that you add to the system.
Is my data backed up? test
Unfortunately, NO. You are responsible for backing up your own work! Please help fund a backup solution.
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We are gradually moving over old cluster nodes. The old cluster was funded by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant in 2012 and consists of four computers, each of which has 16 cores and 128 GB of ram. All of these nodes will be moved to slurm SLURM by 12/15/19.
The following is a graphical representation of how we envision the initial system will be configured:
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How would I get additional disk space?
With help from ITS, you would purchase 5 x 10TB drives for dtn.carleton.edu; these drives would then be exported to all the cluster nodes for your use. The data transfer node (dtn) is setup set up so that drives have to be installed in groups of 5; as a result, so the minimal size is 50 TB. If you don’t need that much space, please share it with the rest of the cluster. As of July 27, 2019, that 50 TB costs $1700. Note, that the system has some redundancy built into it, so only 40 TB will be visable visible to the user.
As stated earlier, we are not currently backing up the system, but a secondary dtn (dtn2.dmz.carleton.edu) is currently available as a potential backup solution. Just like dtn.dmz.carleton.edu, drives need to be purchased in blocks of 5; for $1700, we could add drives to dtn2, and backup data from the cluster to it. Ideally, you would keep your data in the cluster and backups on a separate server…
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