Contents

1. Introduction

Gowonda is a 792 core HPC cluster and consists of a mixture of SGI Altix XE and SGI® Rackable™ C2114-4TY14 servers. It is managed by the eResearch Services unit in Information Services. Gowonda was made possible by a grant from the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) and funding from the University Electronic Infrastructure Capital Fund.

Gowonda will be used to run computations that require large amount of computing resources. All Griffith University researchers and researchers from QCIF affiliated institutions will be able to get access to Gowonda. Similarly Griffith researchers can call upon additional resources from QCIF affiliated institutions if required. Gowonda is a major increase in capability for Griffith University and its partners.
It formally came into operation on Aug 1st 2011.

There is no plan to charge for legitimate research usage of gowonda. However, we will need to meet expectations of the stakeholders. Consequently, we will need to be able to account for all usage on the cluster to satisfy our stakeholders. Information is provided below about how you can assist in this.

This document is loosely modeled after “A Beginner's Guide to the Barrine Linux HPC Cluster” written by Dr. David Green (HPC manager, UQ) , ICE Cluster User Guide written by Bryan Hughes and Wiki pages of the City University of New York (CUNY) HPC Center (see reference for further details).

2. Gowonda Overview

2.1 Hardware

2.1.1 Hardware (2024 upgrade) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.2 Hardware (2019 upgrade) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.2 Old Hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Please note that each of the Extra Large nodes (n020,n021, n022 and n023) have 2 nvidia tesla C-2050 GPU cards.

Special Administrative Nodes (Not used for computing purposes)

More information about the Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 processor can be obtained here.

In addition to the above, there is a special windows HPC node.

Instructions for using the Windows HPC is given in a separate user guide

2.3 Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The operating system on gowonda is RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 updated with SGI foundation-2.4 suite and accelerate-1.2 support package. The queuing system used is PBS Pro 11 . The exception is the Windows HPC node which runs Windows 2008 R2 with Windows HPC pack and Windows HPCS job scheduler. Gowonda has the following compilers and parallel library software. Much more detail on each can be found below.

• GNU C, C++ and Fortran compilers;

• Portland Group, Inc. optimizing C, C++, and Fortran compilers (currently awaiting to be installed);

• The Intel Cluster Studio including the Intel C, C++ and Fortran compilers, Math and Kernel Library;

• Intel MPI , SGI's proprietary MPT and OpenMPI

• Oracle Solaris Studio Compiler (formerly called Sun Studio Compiler)

The following third party applications are currently installed or will be installed shortly. The Gowonda HPC Center staff will be happy to work with any user interested in installing additional applications, subject to meeting that application's license requirements.

The following graphics, IO, and scientific libraries are also supported.

3 Support

3.1 Hours of Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

The fourth Thursday mornings in the month from 8:00AM to 12PM are normally reserved (but not always used) for scheduled maintenance. Please plan accordingly. Unplanned maintenance to remedy system related problems may be scheduled as needed. Reasonable attempts will be made to inform users running on those systems when these needs arise.

3.2 User Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Users are encouraged to read this Wiki carefully. In particular, the sections on compiling and running parallel programs, and the section on the PBS Pro batch queuing system will give you the essential knowledge needed to use the gowonda cluster.

Gowonda cluster staff along with outside vendors also offer some courses to the Griffith HPC community in parallel programming techniques, HPC computing architecture, and the essentials of using our systems. Please follow our mailings on the subject and feel free to inquire about such courses. We can schedule training visits and classes at the various Griffith campuses. Please let us know if such are training visit is of interest.

Users with further questions or requiring immediate assistance in use of the systems should submit a ticket here

Support staff may be contacted via:
Griffith Library and IT help 3735 5555 or X55555
email support: Submit form 
You can log cases on service desk (category: eResearch services.HPC)

eResearch Services, Griffith University
Phone: +61 - 7 - 373 56649 (GMT +10 Hours)
Email:  Submit a Question to the HPC Support Team
Web: griffith.edu.au/eresearch-services

3.3 Service Alerts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Any major disruptions/events will be communicated through emails. These emails will be logged on the following web pages as well.