Owens

OSC's Owens cluster being installed in 2016 is a Dell-built, Intel® Xeon® processor-based supercomputer.

Hardware

Detailed system specifications:

• 824 Dell Nodes
• Dense Compute

  • 648 compute nodes (Dell PowerEdge C6320 two-socket servers with Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (Broadwell, 14 cores, 2.40 GHz) processors, 128 GB memory)

• GPU Compute

  • 160 ‘GPU ready’ compute nodes -- Dell PowerEdge R730 two-socket servers with Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (Broadwell, 14 cores, 2.40 GHz) processors, 128 GB memory

  • NVIDIA Tesla P100 (Pascal) GPUs -- 5.3 TF peak (double precision), 16 GB memory

• Analytics

  • 16 huge memory nodes (Dell PowerEdge R930 four-socket server with Intel Xeon E5-4830 v3 (Haswell 12 core, 2.10 GHz) processors, 1,536 GB memory, 12 x 2 TB drives)

• 23,392 total cores
  • 28 cores/node  & 128 GB of memory/node
• Mellanox EDR (100 Gbps) Infiniband networking

• Theoretical system peak performance
  • ~750 teraflops (CPU only)
• 4 login nodes:
  • Intel Xeon E5-2680 (Broadwell) CPUs
  • 28 cores/node and 256 GB of memory/node
  • IP address: 192.148.247.[141-144]

How to Connect

• SSH Method

To login to Owens at OSC, ssh to the following hostname:

owens.osc.edu 

You can either use an ssh client application or execute ssh on the command line in a terminal window as follows:

ssh <username>@owens.osc.edu

You may see warning message including SSH key fingerprint. Verify that the fingerprint in the message matches one of the SSH key fingerprint listed here, then type yes.

From there, you are connected to Owens login node and have access to the compilers and other software development tools. You can run programs interactively or through batch requests. We use control groups on login nodes to keep the login nodes stable. Please use batch jobs for any compute-intensive or memory-intensive work. See the following sections for details.

• OnDemand Method

You can also login to Owens at OSC with our OnDemand tool. The first step is to login to OnDemand. Then once logged in you can access Owens by clicking on "Clusters", and then selecting ">_Owens Shell Access".

Instructions on how to connect to OnDemand can be found at the OnDemand documention page.

File Systems

Owens accesses the same OSC mass storage environment as our other clusters. Therefore, users have the same home directory as on the old clusters. Full details of the storage environment are available in our storage environment guide.

Software Environment

The module system is used to manage the software environment on owens. Use  module load <package>  to add a software package to your environment. Use  module list  to see what modules are currently loaded and  module avail  to see the modules that are available to load. To search for modules that may not be visible due to dependencies or conflicts, use  module spider . By default, you will have the batch scheduling software modules, the Intel compiler and an appropriate version of mvapich2 loaded.

You can keep up to on the software packages that have been made available on Owens by viewing the Software by System page and selecting the Owens system.

Compiling Code to Use Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX2)

The Haswell and Broadwell processors that make up Owens support the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX2) instruction set, but you must set the correct compiler flags to take advantage of it. AVX2 has the potential to speed up your code by a factor of 4 or more, depending on the compiler and options you would otherwise use.

In our experience, the Intel and PGI compilers do a much better job than the gnu compilers at optimizing HPC code.

With the Intel compilers, use -xHost and -O2 or higher. With the gnu compilers, use -march=native and -O3 . The PGI compilers by default use the highest available instruction set, so no additional flags are necessary.

This advice assumes that you are building and running your code on Owens. The executables will not be portable.  Of course, any highly optimized builds, such as those employing the options above, should be thoroughly validated for correctness.

See the Owens Programming Environment page for details.

Batch Specifics

Refer to the documentation for our batch environment to understand how to use the batch system on OSC hardware. Some specifics you will need to know to create well-formed batch scripts:

• Most compute nodes on Owens have 28 cores/processors per node.  Huge-memory (analytics) nodes have 48 cores/processors per node.
• Jobs on Owens may request partial nodes.

Using OSC Resources

For more information about how to use OSC resources, please see our guide on batch processing at OSC. For specific information about modules and file storage, please see the Batch Execution Environment page.