ARCHIVED: About the Mason retirement

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Overview
System detail comparison
Timeline
Get help

Overview

Mason, Indiana University's large memory computer cluster, will be retired on January 1, 2018.

Carbonate (carbonate.uits.iu.edu) is Mason's replacement and is currently available to IU students, faculty, and staff. To request an account on Carbonate, follow the instructions in Get additional IU computing accounts.

Carbonate nodes run RHEL7. To coordinate resource management and job scheduling, they use the Torque resource manager integrated with Moab Workload Manager. To customize shell environments, they use the Modules environment package. For more, see ARCHIVED: About Carbonate at IU (Retired) and ARCHIVED: Get started on Carbonate.

On this page:

System detail comparison

Carbonate consists of 72 compute (256 GB) nodes and eight large memory compute nodes (512 GB); each node is a Lenovo NeXtScale nx360 M5 server, containing dual Intel Xeon 2680 v3 processors, 10 GB Ethernet adapters, and four 480 GB solid-state drives. Carbonate fully supports high-performance, data-intensive computing, and provides nearly an eighteenfold increase in processing capability over Mason. For more details on Carbonate's system configuration, see ARCHIVED: About Carbonate at IU (Retired).

	Mason	Carbonate
CPUs	72 Intel Xeon L7555 8-core processors	160 Intel Xeon 2680 12-core v3 processors
Processor cores	576	1,920
RAM	9 TB	22 TB
Local storage	7 TB	104 TB (each node has four 480 GB drives in RAID5 config)
Processing capability	Rpeak = 4,285 gigaFLOPS	Rpeak = 76,800 gigaFLOPS

Timeline

The retirement of Mason will move through the following phases:

Carbonate available as a production service: July 17, 2017
New account creation on Mason ends: September 18, 2017
Mason fully retired: On January 1, 2018, Mason will no longer be available and you will be unable to log in.

Get help

Support for IU and NCGAS users is provided by the UITS High Performance Systems (HPS) and Scientific Applications and Performance Tuning (SciAPT) groups, and by the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS):

If you have system-specific questions about Carbonate, email the HPS group.
If you have questions about compilers, programming, scientific/numerical libraries, or debuggers on Carbonate, email the SciAPT group.
If you need help installing software packages in your home directory on Carbonate, email NCGAS.