Advanced Computing Research Centre

BlueCrystal Phase 1

Please note: Phase 1 will be closed down permanently during the Easter vacation, 2015. Any user with data stored on Phase 1 needs to move it by 15 March, 2015.

We recommend that you move serial jobs and small parallel jobs to Phase 2. For large parallel jobs, it is recommended you use Phase 3.

Hardware

The BlueCrystal Phase 1 machine was put together by a consortium of the University, IBM, ClusterVision. The system comprises IBM servers equipped with dual-core AMD Opteron processors, running on a ClusterVisionOS Linux based cluster operating system and software environment.

BlueCrystal Phase 1 comprises:

• 4 login nodes
• 92 nodes each with two dual-core Opteron processors, memory 8 GB RAM per node (2 GB per core)
• 4 thick nodes each with four dual-core opteron processors, memory 32 GB RAM per node (4 GB per core)
• SilverStorm Infiniband high-speed connectivity throughout for parallel code message passing
• General Parallel File System (GPFS) providing data access from all the nodes
• Storage - 11 terabytes.

Software

A full list of the software installed on BlueCrystal Phase 1 is available here.

User Guide

Users should refer to the BlueCrystal User Guide.

If you cannot resolve a problem or there is an error in the system, please email hpc-help@bristol.ac.uk, rather than one of the System Administrators, with details of the problem and the project code. Further details are available on the Support page. Please note that if you need advice on using the UoB VPN to access BlueCrystal from home, you should contact your departmental support officers.