burke.st-andrews.ed.ac.uk (St. Andrews)
burke is a SUSe 9.x Linux HPC cluster consisting of 98 AMD Opteron processing cores connected by Infinipath high speed interconnects.
System Organisation
- 22× 4-processor compute nodes with 8 GB Memory and 160 GB disk space
- 1× 8-processor compute nodes with 16 GB memory and 400 GB disk space
- 1× 2-processor interactive nodes with 4 GB memory and 800 GB disk space
- 1× 4 TB RAID disk array.
Compilers
The Intel compilers are available on the system.
Libraries
The MPI, and LAPACK libraries are also installed.
Job Submission
Queues
The queuing system is set up to try and acheive a balance between parallel and serial jobs on the cluster. There are basically three types of queue on the system, these are: serial queues, parallel queues and fat node queues.
Serial Queues
As the name suggests, these queues run serial jobs on the cluster. They can also be used for array jobs. Array job users should note that there is a maximum of 24 processors available through the serial queues.
The different queues have different priorities so please use the one that corresponds most closely to the time estimated for your job as this will help your job run more quickly.
If you wish to use your own scripts to submit jobs to these queues see Job Submission topic
- serial-medium.q
- Serial queue with a time limit of 1 week.
- serial-long.q
- Serial queue with a no time limit.
Parallel Queues
These queues run parallel (either SMP or distributed memory) jobs on the cluster. Note that there are a maximum of 4 processors in SMP mode or 84 processors in distributed memory mode.
The different queues have different priorities so please use the one that corresponds most closely to the time estimated for your job as this will help your job run more quickly.
If you wish to use your own scripts to submit jobs to these queues then resource reservation should be switched on. See the Job Submission topic
- parallel-short.q
- Parallel queue with a time limit of 3 hours.
- parallel-medium.q
- Parallel queue with a time limit of 1 week.
- parallel-long.q
- Parallel queue with no time limit.
Fat Node Queues
These queues run parallel SMP jobs on the fat (8 processor) nodes on the cluster. They have been particularly designed with large Gaussian 03 jobs in mind. There are a maximum of 8 processors available for each job.
If you wish to use your own scripts to submit jobs to these queues you should bear in mind that each job has exclusive access to a fat node and should therefore use all 8 processors if possible. See the Job Submission topic
- fat.q
- Fat node queue with no time limit.
Please see the Support Pages for more information on submitting jobs to the queue system.
The cluster uses the Sun Grid Engine for controlling and submitting jobs.
