HPC Services staff members Yong Qin and Michael Jennings gave talks highlighting their respective software tools, wwibcheck and NHC, at the DellXL High Performance Computing (HPC) conference this week, April 21-23, 2015, in Boulder, Colorado (agenda).
Most HPC systems rely on a high-performance, low-latency interconnect network to connect compute nodes together in a way that supports tightly-coupled computations, where the compute nodes need to exchange a lot of information as part of the computation. Yong’s talk will focus on how to troubleshoot failures in HPC infiniband interconnects using his software tool, wwwibcheck, which helps the system administrators isolate and identify infiniband equipment failures or performance problems affecting the execution time of compute jobs.
Michael Jennings will also be giving a talk on his Warewulf Node Health Check (NHC) utility software. NHC runs in conjunction with the system’s job scheduler, carrying out a pre-check to detect potential problems with compute nodes before the job starts, optionally marking bad nodes as “offline.” This highly configurable utility works with popular job schedulers, such as SchedMD’s Slurm job scheduler, and Adaptive Computing’s Moab scheduler and TORQUE resource manager.
Yong and Michael are part of High Performance Computing Services Group in the IT Division that supports the Lawrencium computational cluster for the use of Berkeley Lab PIs.
Webspace was one of our early ventures into providing a web based collaboration tool that allowed easy sharing of documents and access from any location in the world. We plan to end service in July 2016.
Google Drive has become a viable alternative to Webspace for many customers at the lab. Google now does this in a better and more economical way. With the exception of a few capabilities (sharing via a "ticket" with an expiration date), Google storage and sharing can do it all.
As a result, we are announcing a longer term exit plan - with the goal of concluding our migration off of Webspace by July, 2016 - over a year from now. We will work with customer over the next 15 months to migrate important data to Google (or other alternatives) and provide instruction on how you can continue to solve your business problems - until we contact you, there is nothing you have to do.
Our project plan and status will be documented here.
IT has issued new policy on the acquisition of smart watches and fitness trackers including the new Apple Watch (which everyone calls iWatch but is not actually called that).
The acquisition of these products now requires additional justification and approvals.
The policy is available to authenticated LBL employees by clicking here.
