LSF - Types of Clusters

Clusters

An LSF cluster can contain both servers and clients. Servers are execution hosts. They run the jobs that you submit to queues. Client hosts do not run jobs themselves but allow you to submit jobs to the servers.

At Research Computing, we have three clusters:

  • topsail
  • lucky
  • conifers

The topsail cluster has over 4000 CPUs and is mainly for running highly parallel jobs. Serial jobs (“chunk”) can also be run there. This cluster is also a Linux cluster.

The lucky cluster has many hosts. Typically these servers have from two to eight CPUs each and run the Linux operating system. But it also has several large AIX hosts with 16 or 32 CPUs each.

The conifers cluster has only one server host (cypress), but it is quite powerful. This server has 128 fast CPUs, 500 GB of memory, and lots of local disk space. The operating system is Linux.

You can use the “lsid” command, at the UNIX prompt (%), to find the name of your cluster. If you are in the lucky cluster, you will see something like: 

% lsid
Platform LSF HPC 7 Update 3, May 01 2008
Copyright 1992-2008 Platform Computing Corporation
      
My cluster name is lucky
My master name is bc12-n01

When you type the command, it may show an LSF version number that is different from the examples above, or it may show a different master name. The important thing is the cluster name.

Note: You cannot submit a job from one to cluster to run in the other cluster. Each cluster is self-contained.

Additional help

More on LSF

Research Computing home page


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