Compute Service Overview

The IT-Services Group currently operates a high performance computing cluster  for scientific calculations. The cluster is available to all PIK scientists which had been registered by their group/research domain and upon request also to external guest scientists. Access is granted via PIK standard computer accounts.*

The IBM iDataPlex Cluster (IPLEX)

• Basic metrics
• 2.784 CPU cores* in three network domains,
• 320 nodes with 2 x 4-core Intel Harpertown CPU and 32 GByte RAM each (dx001 - dx320),
• 56 nodes with 2 x 2-core Intel Woodcrest CPU and 8 GByte RAM each (blade01 - blade56),
  
• Infiniband DDR interconnect,
  
• 300 TByte total disk space.
  
  

• Login via secure shell (ssh) using publickey authentication to interactive host(s): cluster.pik-potsdam.de.**
  
  

• Batch jobs are controlled by IBM Load Leveler.
• Open MPI Library for parallel programming installed.
  
  
• Two parallel file systems available:
• /iplex/01/
  A parallel file system for project groups with storage requirements of 1 to 10 TByte each. These project file systems will be created upon request only. Regular automated backup of data is default.
  
  
• /scratch/01
  A parallel file system for temporary output only. Can be used by any scientist directly. No backup. Files which have not been accessed for a given time - currently 3 months - will be deleted  automatically.
  
  
• User initiated archive/retrieve available via the dsmj command on interactive nodes.
  
  

• Please refer to the High Performance Cluster User Guide for more detailed information.
• Usage Statistics

* Provided a 50% machine utilization about 12 Mio. CPU hours can basically be delivered to scientific applications every year at a approximated cost of about 0.1 EUR/CPU hour.

** Holders of a PIK computer account, which have been registered for the cluster, should copy their public ssh key into their NFS $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys file (see man page:  ssh-keygen (linux) for more information) in order to be able to access the cluster immediately. For Windows based client computers it is necessary to use the free software package "putty" instead of the commercial version of the SSH client. External guest need to send their public keys to: cluster-admin@pik-potsdam.de to access the system.

Please don't forget to check access permissions of your $HOME/.ssh/ directory and files. The current Open SSH implementation won't allow access if permissions are not properly restricted.