Spear is a high-performance cluster of Owner and General Access computers intended to help streamline data exploration and interactive data analysis (read below for the hardware overview of the general access components). By using Spear, you can minimize the need to move large data sets off of HPC. Spear nodes mount both the HPC Lustre and Panasas file systems, which puts your data sets close to high end compute resources. In addition, the general access Spear nodes host a variety of software packages for interactive data analysis and visualization, so that you don't have to deal with installing and maintaining these software packages on your workstation or laptop.

How to Access Spear

Requirements:

• FSU Campus IP address OR established FSU VPN connectionClick here for instructions on connecting to FSU's VPN (https://vpn.fsu.edu/hpc)


• NoMachine (NX) Client OR OpenNX Client (sourceforge download page). Note: Mac OS 10.7.x (Lion) users must use the OpenNX client.

If your computer meets the above requirements, then please

→ Click Here to Start the Spear Interactive Queuing System (IQS) ←

Hardware Overview of Spear

Interactive Dell Nodes (8)

• 12 cores (2 AMD 6-Core 4184, 2.8 GHz)
• 96 GB memory

NVIDIA Tesla m2050 GPUs (16)

• 448 cores (1.55 GHz)
• 3 GB memory

Featured Software Available on Spear

Matlab, VTK, R, VMD

Feature CUDA enabled Software Tested on Spear

BEAST (require BEAGLE libraries)

Policies and Scheduling

General access Spear nodes are available on a first-come-first served basis. Spear is intended to facilitate interactive computing and visualization; therefore, long running non-interactive jobs are not allowed on this system and will be terminated in order to maximize the availability of this system for interactive use. Please use the MOAB or Condor submission systems on submit.hpc.fsu.edu for long running non-interactive jobs. The Spear cluster will be unavailable during a regular maintaince window every Monday morning from 7 AM to 9 AM to apply software updates and to reconfigure the GPU chassis connected to all of the general access Spear nodes. A single user may have open a maximum of two active connections to Spear nodes at any given time.

Summary:

1. Spear should be used for interactive software and data analysis only.
2. Non-interactive jobs can/will be terminated at the digression of FSU HPC.
3. A maximum of two active connections to the Spear cluster per person is allowed.
4. Spear is unavailable every Monday between the hours of 7 and 9 AM for maintenance.

Other links

• NERSC X-Windows Acceleration Via NX
  http://www.nersc.gov/users/data-and-networking/connecting-to-nersc/nx/
• Remote Visualization at the LRZ
  http://www.lrz.de/services/compute/visualisation/