[Beowulf] Introduction and question

[Andrew Holway]

One of us. One of us.

On Sat, 23 Feb 2019 at 15:41, Will Dennis <wdennis at nec-labs.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
>
>
> I thought I’d give a brief introduction, and see if this list is a good
> fit for my questions that I have about my HPC-“ish” infrastructure...
>
>
>
> I am a ~30yr sysadmin (“jack-of-all-trades” type), completely self-taught
> (B.A. is in English, that’s why I’m a sysadmin :-P) and have ended up
> working at an industrial research lab for a large multi-national IT company
> (http://www.nec-labs.com). In our lab we have many research groups (as
> detailed on the aforementioned website) and a few of them are now using
> “HPC” technologies like Slurm, and I’ve become the lead admin for these
> groups. Having no prior background in this realm, I’m learning as fast as I
> can go :)
>
>
>
> Our “clusters” are collections of 5-30 servers, all collections bought
> over years and therefore heterogeneous hardware, all with locally-installed
> OS (i.e. not trad head-node with PXE-booted diskless minions) which is as
> carefully controlled as I can make it via standard OS install via Cobbler
> templates, and then further configured via config management (we use
> Ansible.) Networking is basic 10GbE between nodes (we do have Infiniband
> availability on one cluster, but it’s fell into disuse now since the
> project that has required it has ended.) Storage is one or more traditional
> NFS servers (some use ZFS, some not.) We have within the past few years
> adopted Slurm WLM for a job-scheduling system on top of these collections,
> and now are up to three different Slurm clusters, with I believe a fourth
> on the way.
>
>
>
> My first question for this list is basically “do I belong here?” I feel
> there’s a lot of HPC concepts it would be good for me to learn, so as I can
> improve the various research group’s computing environments, but not sure
> if this list is for much larger “true HPC” environments, or would be a good
> fit for a “HPC n00b” like me...
>
>
>
> Thanks for reading, and let me know your opinions :)
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Will
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