ARCHIVED: On XSEDE, what is Maverick?

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Maverick (maverick.tacc.xsede.org) is an interactive visualization and data analytics system hosted by Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Maverick replaces Longhorn (TACC) as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project's dedicated scientific visualization service.

Note: Longhorn (TACC) was decommissioned from service on the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) April 18, 2014. Maverick (TACC) replaces Longhorn as XSEDE's dedicated scientific visualization service. If you have questions about Longhorn's retirement or Maverick's deployment, contact the XSEDE Help Desk.

Maverick features 132 hybrid CPU/GPU compute nodes, each equipped with an NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, making it especially well suited for interactive visualization and data analysis jobs that query large-scale data sets (i.e., Big Data analysis).

Each of Maverick's 132 Hewlett-Packard ProLiant SL250s Gen8 compute nodes is equipped with two 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2680 V2 CPUs (each with 500 GB of local storage and 256 GB of DDR3 1,886-MHz RAM) and one NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator. A Mellanox FDR InfiniBand interconnect provides high-performance communication between nodes. The Stockyard (TACC) Lustre file system will be mounted, providing 20 PB of storage capacity for Maverick users.

Maverick runs CentOS 6.4, and uses SLURM for resource management and job scheduling. Maverick's normal batch queue handles interactive jobs with runtimes of up to six hours, and CPU and GPGPU batch jobs with runtimes of up to 24 hours. Jobs requiring longer runtimes or a greater number of cores than the normal queue can accommodate may be run in a special queue with prior approval by TACC system administrators. Development queues also are configured and available for use.

Maverick provides a suite of remote visualization services that leverages traditional OpenGL-based applications (e.g., VisIt and ParaView), commercial third-party applications (e.g., EnSight and Amira), and TACC-developed applications (e.g., DisplayCluster and GLuRay).

Principal investigators can request XSEDE allocations on Maverick via the XSEDE User Portal. For instructions, see ARCHIVED: Apply for a new XSEDE allocation

For more, see Maverick User Guide in the XSEDE User Portal.

For more about XSEDE compute, advanced visualization, storage, and special purpose systems, see the Resources Overview, Systems Monitor, and User Guides. For scheduled maintenance windows, outages, and other announcements related to XSEDE digital services, see User News.

This document was developed with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grants 1053575 and 1548562. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.