The eScience Cluster

The eScience Cluster was proposed by the Midlands e-Science Centre university management committee, was financed from the university SRIF-2 budget, and came into service at the beginning of November 2004, with user self-registrations being accepted via the automated registration system from December 2004.

The eScience cluster hardware consists of the following components:

A master node, called escience1.bham.ac.uk.
54 worker nodes, dual-processor, all accessible from the master node.
Each worker node has 2 GBytes of memory, 2 Intel Xeon 3GHz processors, 64 GB of local temporary work space.
A Myrinet backplane, giving programmable fast interconnection (2+2 Gbps) between the worker nodes.
A filestore of raw size 1 TeraByte, accessible by the master and workers.

Key points to consider are:

It is available to staff and postgraduates of the University of Birmingham. (Postgraduates will need to have their supervisor's informed agreement).
It is ideal for tasks which are mainly processor dominated (number-crunching or data-crunching). It is unsuitable for tasks which are data input/output dominated. If in doubt, consult the mesc-cluster-approval team.
All the cluster components run the well-known Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system, version AS 3.
The system has a variety of software, including support for C, C++, Fortran, Java and other languages.
Other facilities may be more suitable for your task. For example: the CAPPS service has a range of commercial software and has much more memory per node, but fewer nodes; the HP Visual and Spatial Technology Centre provides advanced visualisation facilities and shares a filestore with CAPPS. For a general overview of current and future High Performance Computing at Birmingham, see the HPC web site.

Please also note:

When you publish a paper or article or give a talk where the research has used the cluster, please acknowledge use of the Birmingham eScience Cluster. Also let us know, so we can list them in our own talks about the cluster!
If you intend to put any personal information on the eScience Cluster, then you need to inform us at the contact address below, so that we can pass this on to the Data Protection registrar at the university, in order to comply with the Data Protection Act.
When you leave, we cannot take responsibility for preserving your programs or data files, and may delete them after 30 days - you must make arrangements if you want them preserved.

For further details, see the list of links on the left hand side of this page.

L.S.Lowe, eScience contact address: mesc-cluster-approval@contacts.bham.ac.uk