CATAMOUNT - Material Sciences Division

The CATAMOUNT cluster is part of the LBNL Supercluster and shares the same Supercluster infrastructure. This includes the system management software, software module farm, scheduler, storage, and backend network management.

Login and Data Transfer

CATAMOUNT uses One Time Password (OTP) for login authentication for all the services provided below. Please also refer to the Data Transfer page for additional information.

• Login server: lrc-login.lbl.gov
• DATA transfer server: lrc-xfer.lbl.gov
• Globus Online endpoint: lbnl#lrc

Hardware Configuration

Each compute node has dual-socket octa-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) @ 2.60 GHz processors (16 cores in total), 64 GB of physical memory. Compute nodes are connected with each other through multiple high performance Mellanox 56 Gbps FDR Infiniband edge switches then back to a backbone Mellanox SX6518 director switch.

Partition	Nodes	Node List	CPU	Cores	Memory
catamount	116	n0[000-115].catamount0	Intel Xeon E5-2670	16	64GB

Storage and Backup

CATAMOUNT cluster users are entitled to access the following storage systems so please get familiar with them.

Name	Location	Quota	Backup	Allocation	Description
HOME	/global/home/users/$USER	12GB	Yes	Per User	HOME directory for permanent data storage
GROUP-SW	/global/home/groups-sw/$GROUP	200GB	Yes	Per Group	GROUP directory for software and data sharing with backup
GROUP	/global/home/groups/$GROUP	400GB	No	Per Group	GROUP directory for data sharing without backup
SCRATCH	/global/scratch/$USER	none	No	Per User	SCRATCH directory with Lustre high performance parallel file system
CLUSTERFS	/clusterfs/catamount/$USER	none	No	Per User	Private storage

Note

HOME, GROUP, and GROUP-SW directories are located on a highly reliable enterprise level BlueArc storage device. Since this appliance also provides storage for many other mission critical file systems, and it is not designed for high performance applications, running large I/O dependent jobs on these file systems could greatly degrade the performance of all the file systems that are hosted on this device and affect hundreds of users, thus this behavior is explicitly prohibited. HPCS reserves the right to kill these jobs without notification once discovered. Jobs that have I/O requirement should use the SCRATCH file system which is designed specifically for that purpose.

Scheduler Configuration

CATAMOUNT cluster uses SLURM as the scheduler to manage jobs on the cluster. To use the CATAMOUNT resource, the partition catamount must be used (--partition=catamount) along with account catamount (--account=catamount). One of the QoSs from the following table should be used as well (e.g., --qos=cm_short). A standard fair-share policy with a decay half life value of 14 days (2 weeks) is enforced.

The job allocation on CATAMOUNT is exclusive i.e. a node is not shared between two jobs. The different QoS arguments and their limits are shown below:

QOS	QOS Limit
cm_short	4 nodes max per job; 24:00:00 wallclock limit
cm_medium	16 nodes max per job; 72:00:00 wallclock limit
cm_long	32 nodes max per user
cm_debug	2 nodes max per job; 8 nodes in total; 00:30:00 wallclock limit

Software Configuration

CATAMOUNT uses Software Module Farm to manage the cluster-wide software installation.