campus clusters

The Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration team in XCI continues to work with institutions around the state of Oklahoma. Most recently, the team has engaged with Southwest Oklahoma State University to coordinate cyberinfrastructure implementation in support of teaching and research at that institution. CRI also continues to support activities at Langston University, Oral Roberts University, and University of Central Oklahoma.

CRI staff worked together with George Mason University IT staff to conduct cluster build training on local hardware with the XCBC OpenHPC toolkit (https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/knowledge-base/-/kb/document/bfum).  16 staff from George Mason attended and worked with the team over 2 days, building a trio of test clusters for training, software install, and monitoring/benchmarking.

XCRI is testing an OpenHPC version of the XSEDE Compatible Basic Cluster (XCBC) stack.  This allows for the installation of a new cluster based on OpenHPC packages, with some XSEDE-specific configuration and automation to help make managing the system easier.  The toolkit basics and some documentation are available at https://github.com/XSEDE/CRI_XCBC and we are eager to get user responses on the OpenHPC build.

XSEDE Capability and Resource Integration staff assisted in building a new HPC cluster at South Dakota State University in Brookings, South Dakota.  Kevin Brandt, manager of the Networking and Research Computing team at SDSU, reached out to campus bridging staff asking for guidance on upgrading their existing cluster, BigJack, using the tools provided by XSEDE. The new cluster, named Campanile, will eventually integrate the nodes currently used in BigJack, resulting in a final size of 71 nodes, with 3360 TB of total RAM and 840 total cores.