Adding a few YCCSA people to the admin side doesn't seem problematic to me.

Also, projects and departments can be defined within the SGE that divvy resources according to whatever policy we may implement.

I didn't realise that their machines ran diskless... that is quite hardcore.  Not so trivial then.

I was wondering, has there ever been a call to setup a uni wide grid computing environment at all?  A good number of departments would benefit from a large cluster of machines.  Birmingham Uni have a similar facility that at least all researchers can access to perform large scale computation.  Having access to such a resource really broadens horizons with respect to the scale of experimentation that can be done.

Cheers

Jan

On 28 Feb 2011, at 16:51, James Carter wrote:

> On 28/02/11 16:38, Jan Staunton wrote:
>> 
>> Looks as if YCCSA use SGE as well, meaning a merging of the two resources would be trivial.
> 
> they do, yes.
> 
>> They have 96 cores with low memory, and a 16-core machine with tonnes of memory.
> 
> 128 GB - it's a similar machine to our imola.
> 
> the main issue with their nodes is lack of memory. they are 4 core machines with 4 gig of memory. this is compounded by the fact the the nodes run disc-less so about 1G of the RAM is used to store the OS. the theory is that, if/when they merge with our system, they would be fitted with discs to store the OS (our linux) and for swap space.
> 
>> 
>> They have a bunch of strange restrictions on jobs, such as memory limits etc so they are prolly better versed in SGE config than we are :)
>> 
> 
> i expect the primary driver for this is the lack of memory on their nodes. from the technical side of things i can see how it's all going to work. what i don't know is how you're going to deal with the config and partitioning of resources when you have different groups of people using the cluster. at the moment we have a small group of grid administrators and there hasn't been any conflict. would this work post-merger with some biology people added to the list of administrators or do we need a different system?
> 
> -- 
> James Carter, Senior Experimental Officer
>