Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) expands Pitzer Cluster, migrates to Slurm

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), which is one of UMaine Advanced Research Computing (ARC)’s high performance computing partners, has recently expanded their Pitzer Cluster. In September 2020, OSC installed an additional 398 Intel® Xeon® ‘Cascade Lake’ processor-based nodes as part of an expansion cluster and reached full production status on Tuesday, September 22, 2020.

This expansion approximately triples the peak capacity of the original Pitzer cluster (which includes 260 Intel® Xeon® ‘Skylake’ processor-based nodes), adding 3.8 petaflops. Below is a summary of the hardware information:

• 340 “dense compute” nodes (48 cores, 192GB RAM)
• 42 Dual GPU nodes (48 cores, 384GB RAM, 2 V100 32GB GPUs)
• 4 Quad GPU nodes (48 cores, 768GB RAM, 4 V100 32GB GPUs)
• 12 large memory nodes (48 cores, 768GB RAM)

In addition, OSC switched to Slurm for job scheduling and resource management on Pitzer, replacing the Torque/Moab environment. OSC also enabled a PBS compatibility layer in order to make the transition as smooth as possible. For more information on the migration, you can visit this informational page. Those who are already or have interest to utilize OSC services through UMaine ARC can contact Kevin Wentworth (kevin.wentworth@maine.edu) with any questions.