Month: December 2022

During the winter maintenance, our infrastructure team ran the HPL linpack benchmark to ensure proper operation of the cluster after the maintenance on compute nodes was performed, and also to verify the hardware stability of compute nodes. The team was able to achieve a score of 3.01 PetaFLOPS during this testing.

The RCD team performed scheduled maintenance on the Palmetto Cluster between December 21st and 23rd, 2022. The following changes were made:

• We have patched and rebooted all compute nodes; firmware has been updated.
• We have updated firmware and OS versions on all network switches.
• We have updated BeeGFS.
• We have installed new optimized versions of OpenMPI and new versions of software that depend on OpenMPI. The old versions were not modified and will remain installed until everyone can migrate to the new optimized versions.

Clemson University has funded the purchase of additional compute resources for the Palmetto Cluster. The infrastructure team has added 40 new nodes with 2x 32-core CPUs, 256GB of RAM, and 2x NVIDIA A100 GPUs to the cluster. These resources will be for shared use by the Clemson research community.

The Research Computing and Data (RCD) group held a town hall on Thursday, December 15, 2022 from 2-3 p.m via Zoom. We shared with the community our new team structure, new node additions to Palmetto, new flash storage system, and our future goals.

Resulting from the community’s input, we have made the following changes:

• The units named “CITI” (user support) and “ACI” (infrastructure support) have been eliminated.
• The newly formed “Research Computing and Data” (RCD) division in CCIT combines RCD Engagement (formerly CITI) and RCD Infrastructure (formerly ACI) into one group to better serve the research community and to streamline operations.
• RCD Infrastructure (RCDI) is led by Corey Ferrier and is responsible for installing, operating, and maintaining the research computing hardware infrastructure, including the Palmetto HPC cluster and data storage.
• RCD Engagement (RCDE) is led by Jill Gemmill and is responsible for research computing user support including training, application installation, and one-on-one help with using the research computing facilities. RCDE also includes the Center for Geospatial Technologies.
• RCD is expanding the Palmetto HPC support team and adding new support services for Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Data Science, and regulated data such as PHI and CUI.
• Clemson has invested $6M for a new data lake storage system, new Palmetto nodes, improved hardware for ArcGIS software, specialized machine learning nodes, and systems for secure use and analysis of regulated research data (such as PHI/HIPAA and Controlled Unclassified Information).

For more details, please review the slide deck and webinar recording of the town hall (Clemson login required).