This document summarizes the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources available through UConn's Storrs campus computing cluster. It provides an overview of the cluster's architecture and alignment with other UConn clusters, popular applications used, technical specifications of the cluster nodes, default resource allocations, available storage and data transfers, training opportunities, support resources, and details on the Connecticut Education Network fiber connectivity between campuses. Usage of the cluster has increased significantly from 54 million core hours in 2011 to over 31 billion core hours in 2016. The cluster provides resources for engineering, science, and other computationally-intensive fields.

1. High Performance Computing
(HPC)
Storrs Campus
Ed Swindelles
ed@uconn.edu
2/24/2017

2. Storrs HPC
• Alignment between Storrs and Farmington/CBC HPC clusters
– Storrs – General purpose HPC for traditional workloads
(Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, etc.), with tightly-coupled
systems architecture (Infiniband + parallel file system).
– Farmington/CBC – Focus on Bioscience workloads (genomics,
bioinformatics, etc.), with data/memory intensive architecture.
– Shared storage across campuses – ~3PB of object storage
(Amazon S3, REST) with file system gateways (NFS, SMB).
– 100Gbe frictionless network between resources (Science DMZ).
• Storrs cluster access is available to all UConn researchers at all
campuses at no charge.
• Researchers who require high priority access invest in semi-
dedicated nodes – “condo model”. Capital investment only.

3. Usage
• 54M total core hours used 2011 through 2016
• Equivalent to 6,172 years of continuous execution on a single-core PC
0.16M
2.06M
3.60M
6.83M
9.67M
31.75M
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Popular Applications
• MATLAB
• ANSYS
• MPI libraries
• Intel compiler suite
• R, Python
• HDF5, NetCDF
• GROMACS
• IDL
• CUDA
• NAMD
• Gaussian
• CHARMM
• COMSOL
• ABAQUS
• Schrodinger
• Avizo

4. Technical Specifications
• Most common CPU nodes (184 total):
– 24 cores @ 2.6Ghz, 128GB RAM, 200GB local SSD, FDR Infiniband
• Most dense CPU nodes (4 total):
– 44 cores @ 2.2Ghz, 256GB RAM, 800GB local SSD, FDR Infiniband
• New academic cluster: ~450 cores available
CPU Cores 6,328
CPU Architecture Intel Xeon x64
Total RAM 33TB
Interconnect FDR Infiniband
Shared Storage 1PB Parallel Storage
Accelerators Intel Xeon Phi and NVIDIA GPUs
Operating System Linux
Peak Performance 250 Teraflops
Campus Connection 20Gbps Ethernet
Hardware Partners

5. Default Resource Allocations
Partition Cores Runtime
general
(default)
192 12 hours
parallel 384 6 hours
serial 24 7 days
debug
(high priority)
24 30 minutes
Path Description
/scratch
• High performance, parallel
• 1 petabyte shared, no quotas
• 30 day data retention, no backups
/work
• High performance local SSD on
each node, ~150GB per node.
• 5 day data retention, no backups
/archive
• Highly resilient, permanent
• Low relative performance
/home
• 50GB non-shared personal storage
• Backed up regularly
/shared
• Shared storage for teams/labs
• Backed up regularly
Data transfers facilitated by our Globus endpoint:
uconnhpc#dtn-transfer
https://wiki.hpc.uconn.edu/index.php/Globus_Connect
Researchers who purchase priority
allocations have no runtime limits on their
cores once their job begins.
Compute Allocations Data Allocations

6. More Information
• Attend our Beginner HPC
Training on the Storrs campus in
Laurel Hall room 306 on 3/6
10AM-12PM. Then, Advanced
HPC Training on 3/20.
• For more information, and to
apply for an account:
http://hpc.uconn.edu
• Documentation:
http://wiki.hpc.uconn.edu
• Technical support:
hpc@uconn.edu
• My contact info:
Ed Swindelles
ed@uconn.edu
Phone: x4522
Office: Storrs, HBL A-09
UConn High Performance Computing
with Dell EMC and Intel
http://s.uconn.edu/hpcvideo

7. Connecticut Education Network
• Providing Network Access for data intensive needs
• Feb 2015: completed 100G Science DMZ connection
between Storrs (main campus) and UConn Health
Center (Farmington).
• Result of 2013 successful NSF Grant (CC-NIE
#1341007) to UConn’s School of Engineering Computer
Networking Research Group, to provide 100G layer-2
connectivity Science DMZ beginning in Jan 2014.

8. Diverse Fiber Path

9. CEN Core Backbone