Developments at Nebraska

I thought I would do a quick post about recent developments at Nebraska.

Tusker & OSG

New Tusker Cluster

We recently received a new cluster, Tusker.  It is our newest in a line of clusters that prioritize memory per core, and cores per node over clock speed.  Therefore, the cluster is 104 nodes, 102 of which are 64 core, 256GB nodes.

The goal of this cluster is to enable higher throughput of local user jobs while enabling backfilling of grid jobs.  The current breakdown of local and grid jobs can be found on the hcc monitoring page.

A common complaint among our local users is interference between processes on the nodes.  To address this, we patched torque to add cgroups support for cpu isolation.  Memory isolation should come into production in the next few weeks.  This will affect grid jobs by locking down their usage to only a single core.

Nebraska's goal is to support all OSG VO's, and give them equal priority (albeit lower than local users).  All OSG VO's are welcome to run on Tusker.


Nebraska's Contribution to OSG Opportunistic Usage

Opportunistic usage by Site (source)

Nebraska resources have become the largest contributor to opportunistic resources.  Easily over 1/4 of opportunistic usage is happening at Nebraska.  We are #1 (Tusker), #2 (prairiefire), and after adding Firefly's different CE's, #7.  We are very proud of this contribution, and hope it continues.

Stay tuned, the next year should be exciting...