Quick summary: another compute node for the Maths cluster, specialist software on the cluster
Come mid-February, there's not a lot of exciting news to report. This is mainly because much work is ongoing with private clusters and projects which are outside the scope of the sysnews site but one thing that will be of general interest is the addition of macomp18 to the compute cluster. Sporting two Xeon processors with just 4 cores in each but clocked at 3.5 GHz, this is the fastest node in the cluster and is fitted with 512 GB of memory. It is is intended for either fast serial or large memory computational jobs; three new cluster queues have been created to run on macomp18 - these are called large240, large384 and large500 (with 240 GB, 384 GB and 500 GB max memory respectively).
Following user requests since Christmas, more packages are now available on the cluster including Flint, Fastree, FastML, iqTree and on macomp000 only at present, Julia. Also, not widely advertised at the time, the Gerris 2D & 3D and gfsviewer packages were added to the cluster in early September last year.