ARCHIVED: Getting started on Mason

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Note:

Mason, Indiana University's large memory computer cluster, will be retired on January 1, 2018. For more, see ARCHIVED: About the Mason retirement.

Mason (mason.indiana.edu) at Indiana University is a large memory computer cluster configured to support data-intensive, high-performance computing tasks for researchers using genome assembly software (particularly software suitable for assembly of data from next-generation sequencers), large-scale phylogenetic software, or other genome analysis applications that require large amounts of computer memory. At IU, Mason accounts are available to IU faculty, postdoctoral fellows, research staff, and students involved in genome research. IU educators providing instruction on genome analysis software, and developers of such software, are also welcome to use Mason. IU has also made Mason available to genome researchers from the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project.

Mason consists of 18 Hewlett-Packard (HP) DL580 servers, each containing four Intel Xeon L7555 8-core processors and 512 GB of RAM, and two HP DL360 login nodes, each containing two Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors and 24 GB of RAM. The total RAM in the system is 9 TB. Each server chassis has a 10-gigabit Ethernet connection to the other research systems at IU and the XSEDE network (XSEDENet).

Mason nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 6.x). The system uses TORQUE integrated with Moab Workload Manager to coordinate resource management and job scheduling. The Data Capacitor II and Data Capacitor Wide Area Network 2 (DC-WAN2) parallel file systems are mounted for temporary storage of research data. The Modules environment management package on Mason allows users to dynamically customize their shell environments.

Following is a selection of IU Knowledge Base documents to help you get started using Mason. For additional documentation, search the Knowledge Base.

On this page:

System overview
Accounts, access, and user policies
Programming environment
Running jobs
X forwarding and interactive jobs
Application-specific help
Getting help

System overview

Accounts, access, and user policies

Programming environment

Running jobs

X forwarding and interactive jobs

Using X forwarding to run interactive jobs with GUIs

Application-specific help

Getting help

Research computing support at IU is provided by the Research Technologies division of UITS. To ask a question or get help regarding Research Technologies services, including IU's research supercomputers and research storage systems, and the scientific, statistical, and mathematical applications available on those systems, contact UITS Research Technologies. For service-specific support contact information, see Research computing support at IU.