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Caviness

The Caviness cluster was built in late 2018 according to a rolling upgradeable design strategy. Like previous community clusters, over time additional nodes will be added. But starting in the sixth year of its life, nodes exiting their warranty period will be replaced and the infrastructure surrounding them reused.

The larger amount of reusable infrastructure is afforded by the Open Compute Project (OCP) design of the cluster. Penguin Computing's Tundra design uses centralized DC power conversion in the racks to make node sleds as small and efficient as possible. Remove the old sleds and insert the new.

Many Engineering research groups own capacity in Caviness.

The design of Caviness is similar to previous community clusters.

Networking

There are two private ethernet networks in the cluster. A dedicated 1 Gbps network carries management traffic (remote power control of nodes, console access, etc.). A dedicated 10 Gbps network carries all data traffic (NFS, job scheduling, SSH access) to the nodes.

A 100 Gbps Intel Omni-path network also connects all nodes. The OPA network carries Lustre filesystem traffic as well as most MPI internode communications.

Storage

Each rack of compute equipment added to Caviness is designed to add storage capacity to the cluster:

  • Lustre Object Storage Targets (OSTs) and Servers (OSSs)
  • NFS server

The addition of OSTs/OSSs increases the aggregate capacity and bandwidth of the /lustre/scratch filesystem. Individual NFS servers provide distinct capacity and bandwidth but do not aggregate with existing capacity or bandwidth — in short, they're just “more space.”

Home directories

Each user is granted a home directory with a 20 GiB limit (quota). Typically users will build software in their home directory. The relatively low quota often means that users cannot (and should not) submit computational jobs from their home directories. Home directories are mounted at the path /home/<uid_number>, where <uid_number> is a user's Unix UID number (an integer value, use the id command to determine it).

The Bash shell allows you to reference your home directory as ~/ in most commands. For example, ls -al ~/ displays a long listing of the all hidden and normally-visible files and directories inside your home directory.

The home directory is the location of a few important files and directories:

FileDescription
.bashrcCommands executed by any new Bash shell spawned for the user
.bash_profileCommands executed specifically by a new login shell for the user
.bash_historySaved sequence of commands the user has interactively entered at the shell prompt
.bash_uditConfiguration file controlling UD-specific behaviors of the Bash shell
.valet/Directory containing a user's personal VALET package definitions; does not exist by default, should be created by the user if wanted (automatically added to VALET_PATH by UD Bash login scripts)
.zfs/snapshot/Directory containing historical snapshots of the home directory

The use of ZFS snapshots as backup copies of a home directory is discussed elsewhere. In general, the editing of .bashrc and .bash_profile is discouraged, especially for the alteration of the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables.

Workgroup directories

Each workgroup that purchases capacity in the cluster receives a workgroup directory with a quota in proportion to its level of investment in the cluster: the more compute capacity purchased, the more space granted. Workgroup directories are mounted at the path /work/<workgroup-id> on all nodes in the cluster.

Once you've started a shell in a workgroup using the workgroup -g <workgroup-id> command the WORKDIR environment variable contains the path to the workgroup directory. This allows you to reference it in commands like ls -l ${WORKDIR}/users.

Adding the -c flag to the workgroup command automatically starts the workgroup shell in $WORKDIR.

The typical layout of a workgroup directory often includes:

SubdirectoryDescription
/work/<workgroup-id>/.zfs/snapshot/Always present, contains historical snapshots of the the workgroup directory
/work/<workgroup-id>/sw/A directory to hold software used by multiple members of the workgroup
/work/<workgroup-id>/sw/valet/Directory for VALET package definitions (automatically added to VALET_PATH by UD Bash login scripts)
/work/<workgroup-id>/users/Directory to contain per-user storage rather than having them exist directly under /work/<workgroup-id>
/work/<workgroup-id>/projects/Directory to contain per-project storage rather than having them exist directly under /work/<workgroup-id>

None of these directories are mandatory, but they do tend to make management of a workgroup's resources easier. In particular, the fact that /work/<workgroup-id>/sw/valet will be automatically added to the VALET search path means workgroup users do not need to alter VALET_PATH manually, in their .bashrc/.bash_profile, or in their job scripts.

The use of ZFS snapshots as backup copies of a workgroup directory is discussed elsewhere.

  • caviness/start.1552665723.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2019/03/15 16:02
  • by frey