ARCHIVED: Completed project: Quarry installation, AVIDD replacement

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Primary UITS contact: George Turner

Completed: December 14, 2007

Description: Indiana University's newest supercomputer, Quarry, went into production service on August 20, 2007. The seven teraFLOPS Quarry system replaces the two teraFLOPS AVIDD system, which was removed from service on September 4, 2007.

Like AVIDD, Quarry is built from Intel processors and runs Red Hat Linux as its operating system. When the retirement of AVIDD was discussed at the Research Technologies Round Table in January 2007, it became clear that many researchers preferred to continue working in that familiar environment, rather than migrating to the more powerful Big Red cluster. To meet the needs of these ongoing research programs, the Quarry cluster was commissioned.

Quarry consists of 112 IBM HS21 Blade servers, each containing two Intel Xeon 5335 quad-core processors, 8 GB of memory, a 36 GB locally attached SCSI disk for local scratch space, and gigabit Ethernet for system interconnects. The Blade configuration provides electrical power and cooling advantages, which makes Quarry much more cost-effective than AVIDD while occupying much less space.

Quarry uses the TORQUE resource manager for batch jobs (an open source project based on PBS) and the Moab Workload Manager to implement scheduling optimization and fairness policies. The user environment is generally similar to AVIDD's. The SoftEnv environment management system is used to simplify application and environment configuration.

For more information, refer to the Quarry home page.

Outcome: The goal of this project was to retire hardware that had reached the end of its lifecycle and to provide newer, faster replacement Intel hardware for research computing as well as the general Unix computing environment. Quarry is also serving as the replacement hardware for the Steel cluster, which is to be retired on June 30, 2008.

Milestones and status:

  • June 11: Quarry hardware arrives at WCC
  • August 7: High Performance Applications group given accounts on Quarry; software installs begin
  • August 20: Quarry goes into production service; user account creates begin
  • September 17: Open Science Grid software available
  • September 30: 266 TB GPFS was mounted on Quarry and Libra
  • October 31: TeraGrid software available for Science Gateways

Comment process: Send email to High Performance Systems.

Benefits: Quarry provides a newer, faster, more robust Intel environment for research computing. Quarry also serves as the replacement hardware for the Steel cluster, although it will not host the mypage.iu.edu service. That service is being transitioned to the Enterprise Web Technical Services group and will reside on servers managed by the Enterprise System Administration group.

Related information: See the Quarry home page.

Primary client: IU students, faculty, and staff and TeraGrid researchers

Project team:

  • Matt Allen
  • Jeff Gronek
  • Dave Hancock
  • Mike Lowe
  • George Turner

Governance: Craig Stewart, Associate Dean for Research Technologies

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 15:30:30.