On Jan 20, 2015, at 5:36 PM, John Valdes <[email protected]> wrote:
We're more than happy to help out. We do request that you put in a project request here: http://press3.mcs.anl.gov/jlse/projects/project-request-form/, so we can track who is using JLSE and what people are using the hardware for.
Will do; actually, some of the existing projects involve topics I'm interested in exploring (Linux Containers for HPC; Campus Storage Service).
We have most of Eureka's nodes (~90 nodes) available if you need dedicated hardware but can deal with old hardware for things like testing out containers. We also have about half of Intrepid's old DDN storage and file servers available for projects. Again its old, and uses Myrinet but can provide an interesting testbed. We have ported the MX kernel module all the way up to the 3.13 kernel so far. We've stripped most of Intrepid's MX network, so it is a significantly more basic topology. No optics, and thus stable. We should talk more in-depth about our Petrel testbed, which is a campus storage project.
If you end up requiring specific hardware to be purchased, we may be able to accommodate depending on cost, and how much use the testbed would see beyond your own project. If LRCR has budget for test hardware and wants JLSE to host it, thats likely something we can accommodate as well.
That's good to know, thanks. Do you guys get vendor no-cost-loans? Do you do storage system evaluations as well, by which I'm mainly mean commercial storage products (arrays and storage software) rather than home-built storage systems.
We've received loan hardware from Intel, Mellanox, and Nvidia on a regular basis. We're open to getting loaners from other companies as long as their NDAs/terms/etc are acceptable with procurement and legal. If you want anything that resembles fast turn around, ask the vendor to not provide their own T&Cs for the loan outside of when they want it back. We'll likely be getting a loaner DDN Infinite Memory Engine (IME) burst buffer box on loan at some point. There will also be a Cray Sonexion 2000 (Xyratex ClusterStor 9000) Lustre eval system that's being installed at the same time as Cooley (Tukey replacement from Cray). JLSE shortly will be sharing Vesta's FDR10 fabric, so we'll be able to use Vesta as clients for I/O testbeds that live in JLSE. In addition to any other of our nodes that live in 240. We can certainly host commercial storage system evals as long as we have floor space or rack space. Unless it's directly applicable to ALCF3 work, LCF staff (including myself) likely won't be able to provide much labor todo the actual evaluation however. Ben