Bighouse

Processors :

Bighouse is an SGI Altix 4700. Bighouse has 16 dual core Itanium II's giving an effective 32 cpus of which 30 are available for batch jobs. It is a single system image ccNUMA system meaning that all cpus can access all memory in the system allowing for large threaded codes (OpenMP, pthreads, etc) to be ran. The system has 96GB of Ram and a 280 GigaByte scratch file system.

Login node :

bighouse.engin.umich.edu

System memory:

96GB ccNUMA.

Networking:

The Altix is a shared memory single system image. It is all tied together with NUMALink4 with 3.2GB/s bandwith and 1 micro sec. latency.

Scratch Storage:

Bighouse shares its /home with the cluster nyx.engin. So you will have access to your 80GB of space. Note though: Code for Bighouse is NOT compatable with nyx. You will need to recompile your code for Bighouse on Bighouse.

The directory /tmp is the local scratch storage. It provide local data repositories that are faster than using your home directory. Use of /tmp over your home directory is encouraged.

Batch System:

The Altix uses the PBS batch system like all other CAC systems. Jobs should be submitted to the route queue.

#PBS -q route

All jobs must request memory. If a job does not request memory it will be killed after it starts.

#PBS -l mem=20gb

Compiling Code:

The default compilers are the Intel C, C++ and Fortran77/90 compilers. They do support OpenMP. They are:

C: icc
C++: icpc
Fortran77/90: ifort


For MPI code the MPT (Message Passing Toolkit) is provided by SGI and is optimized for the shared memory configuration of the Altix. To compile MPI code do the following:

icc source.c -lmpi
ifort source.f -lmpi

Compiler Options:
-fast Common Optimizations
-openmp Enable OpenMP

Software:

The following software is installed by the CAC:

nastran
abaqus
ansys
msmodel (Castep, Dmol)
Gaussian
mkl (Math Kernel Library)

Contract cac-support@umich.edu for information.