Aura

Server aura.fi.muni.cz is available to employees and FI students for longer or more demanding calculations. Access to the machine is automatically generated by FI and PhD students; to other students only for study and research purposes at the request of the bachelor or master thesis supervisor,

Way of work

We do not currently consider introducing a queuing system for long-running tasks. It is sufficient if you run low-priority running processes (10-19, 19 is the lowest). Long-term processes are those that run for over an hour. For example, use the command nice ./váš_program . You can also restrict the program to use only some processors with a command taskset . Startup example with minimum priority on 11th to 15th processor:

nice -n 19 taskset -c 10-14 ./váš_program

You can use the command to change the priority of the already running process renice , which can be applied to threads, processes, or process groups (see command page). However, you need to think that the process can run in multiple threads, and changing the priority for one process can change the priority of just one thread. For example, a listing of all the threads of my processes, including priorities, can be obtained from the following command:

ps x -Lo pgid,pid,tid,user,nice,tty,time,args

You can run short-term processes or interactive debugging of your programs at a normal priority.

In the event that your process does not meet the priority constraints and will use a large amount of computing performance, the lowest priority will be set for all your processes to prevent other users from limiting it. For a repeated or more serious violation of this policy, you may temporarily block the faculty account.

Only in the case of higher interest in the computing server services will we introduce a front-end system, where the user will be able to determine in advance how many processors and memory his job will use and estimate how long they will run.

Disk capacity

For temporary data that should be available locally quickly, directories are available /tmp and /var/tmp on a fast RAID-10 volume. To use this space, store your data in the directory with your login. Note, however, that older data stored here is automatically deleted (u /tmp in the age of days, u /var/tmp in the order of months). In addition, the user can use his faculty home directory. You need to Faculty administration allow his export for server Aura NFS protocol.

Hardware Configuration

Server Aura now running on the HP DL980 G7 platform in the following configuration:

• 8 eight-core 64-bit Intel Xeon X7560 2.26 GHz processors ( 64 cores in total).
• 448 GiB DDR3 RAM
• Gigabit Ethernet connection
• 8 disk capacity of 300 GB, 10k RPM, connected to HW RAID-10, ie 1.2 TB of logic capacity

Software Configuration

The server is installed on Linux - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. There is also a teaching software for 64-bit and 32-bit Linux tree /packages .