Minnesota Supercomputer Institute

Netfinity Linux Cluster (Retired June 30, 2008.)

On June 30, 2008, MSI retired the Netfinity Linux cluster that was operational and in use for nearly eight years. During the first half of 2008, User Support has been assisting users to migrate them off of the Netfinity. All software available on the Netfinity has already been migrated to other systems. The Netfinity is being replaced in the late summer/early fall of 2008 with a new system specifically designated to run loosely coupled parallel or serial jobs.

The Nefinity was originally deployed as a 16-node, 32-processor system in 2000 and was expanded to 80 nodes and 160 processors in August of 2002. In the nearly six years since that upgrade, the system has run 775,353 jobs for 280 unique users and provided 1,645,100 CPU-hours of computation which is the equivalent of 188 years of single-processor computing power. At its peak in Spring 2006, the system ran at better than 81% efficiency and completed a 2 processor run for more than 329 hours (almost two full weeks).

When MSI initially installed the Netfinity, its first Linux cluster, only 10.8% of the systems on the Top500 list ran Linux and only 1.2% of them used the x86 architecture. Today, 85.2% of the systems run Linux and 86.6% use x86 architectures. Thus, the acquisition of the Netfinity showed incredible foresight on the Institute's part as an early adopter of emerging technologies.

Netfinity is an IBM Netfinity Linux cluster. The cluster consists of 40 IBM xSeries 330 nodes and 11 HS20 compute nodes. In total, Netfinity consists of 102 compute cores and 146 GB of main memory.

Machine status

The Netfinity machine was retired June 30, 2008. Information for this machine is being maintained on the web for an additional six months after retirement. If you have questions about the migration or use of software on other systems, please contact User Support.

Getting an account

New accounts are not being issued for Netfinity as this machine was retired June 30, 2008. If you have questions about the migration or use of software on other systems, please contact User Support.

Getting Help

You may contact the User Support staff for help or to report problems with the system, through the help request form, by sending email to User Support, or by calling 612-626-0802 (8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday).

Hardware

For a description of the processors, storage and networking of Netfinity, see the hardware page.

Software

For a listing of software titles available on Netfinity, see the software page.

Quick Start

For a quick introduction to working on Netfinity, see the quick start guide.

Policies and Procedures

The policies and procedures page details policies specific to Netfinity. Policies common to all MSI core hardware can be found on the main policy page.

User Resources

An in-depth discussion of operations on Netfinity is available on the user resources page.