Major Upgrade for Radon Cluster
The Radon cluster will be upgraded on Monday, February 16, 2015 with new energy-efficient HP Moonshot hardware and increased capacity. This upgrade should not cause any disruption of service.
Today, Radon consists of 30 nodes, each containing two 4-core Intel Harpertown processors (for a total of eight cores per node), and 16 GB of RAM, interconnected with 1 GBit/sec Ethernet. As of Monday, February 16, submitted jobs on Radon will be scheduled on 45 HP Moonshot nodes.
Each new node contains an Intel Haswell processor with Hyperthreading enabled, 32 GB of RAM, SSD temporary space, and 10 GBit/sec Ethernet. The physical core count per node will be four, but Intel's Hyperthreading technology allows for two simultaneous execution threads per core. Nodes will be treated by the job scheduler as if eight cores were available, and jobs can continue to be submitted with ppn values up to eight.
All storage system access (home, scratch, and depot) will remain the same after the upgrade.
Currently running jobs on Radon will not be affected. On Monday, February 16, Radon's job scheduler will begin routing jobs to the new hardware, and as jobs on the older nodes complete, those nodes will be taken out of service.
As always, please let us know at rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have questions or concerns about this upgrade.