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DIRAC1 Cluster

The DIRAC1 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

DIRAC1 uses One Time Password (OTP) for login authentication for all the services provided below.

Hardware Configuration

DIRAC1 has a mixture of different type of hardware. Compute nodes are connected with each other through a high-performance Mellanox 56Gbps FDR switch.

PARTITION NODES NODE LIST CPU CORES MEMORY
dirac1 56 n0[000-055].dirac1 INTEL XEON E5-2670 v3 24 256GB
dirac1 72 n0[056-127].dirac1 INTEL XEON E5-2650 v4 24 256GB

Storage and Backup:

DIRAC1 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/$GROUP 400GB No Per Group GROUP directory for data sharing without backup
SCRATCH /global/scratch/users/$USER none No Per User SCRATCH directory with Lustre high performance parallel file system
CLUSTERFS /clusterfs/dirac1/$USER none No Per User Private storage

Note

HOME, GROUP, GROUP-SW and CLUSTERFS 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:

DIRAC1 cluster uses SLURM as the scheduler to manage jobs on the cluster. To use the DIRAC1 resource the partition dirac1 must be used (--partition=dirac1) along with account dirac1 (--account=dirac1). A standard fair-share policy with a decay half life value of 14 days (2 weeks) is enforced. For users from ac_ciftgp (Guggenheim Users), the default QOS is dirac1_normal. This is the high priority QOS which will preempt low priority jobs if those jobs need resources. For users from ac_cifgres, the default QOS is dirac1_lowprio. This is the low priority QOS. When system is busy and there are higher priority jobs pending, scheduler will preempt jobs that are running with this low priority QOS. dirac1_highprio is a special QoS which will preempt both dirac1_lowprio and dirac1_normal.

PARTITION ACCOUNT NODES NODE LIST NODE FEATURES SHARED QOS QOS LIMIT
dirac1 dirac1 128 n0[000-127].dirac1 dirac1 Exclusive dirac1_lowprio dirac1_normal dirac1_highprio no limit no limit no limit

Software Configuration

DIRAC1 uses Software Module Farm Environment Modules to manage the cluster wide software installation.

Cluster Status

Please visit here for the live status of DIRAC1 cluster.

Additional Information

Please send us tickets to hpcshelp@lbl.gov or send email to ScienceIT@lbl.gov for any inquiries or service requests.