The Physics Linux PC Farm

The Linux PC farm is designed for computation intensive tasks, especially those that can benefit from loose or trivial parallelization.
It is intended for batch processing only.
Over 20 TB of disk space available to the farm processors.
The nodes are interconnected via a non-blocking 1Gbit/sec ethernet switch.
A 10 tape DLT8000 autoloader (up to 80GB per tape) and a single tape DLT8000 drive are availalble for transfering very large data sets in and out of the farm.

The farm is part of the World-wide LHC Computing Grid, WLCG, with the site name "WEIZMANN-LCG2".

The farm runs with the Scientific Linux operating system.

Installed software includes:

NAGLIB and CERNLIB,
MPI, PVM and Portland PGI Fortran/C for parallel applications,
PBS for batch scheduling,
AFS for access to international file systems.

Due to the large amount of disk space, only a part is backed up. User's home directories are, however, backed up.

Two servers provide a log in service and have fast RAID arrays for heavy IO interactive work.

Several classes of disk storage are provided. These are defined in the link below.

The farm is connected to the Institute network and to the Israeli Academic backbone via a 1Gbit/sec optical link.

Check out the PC farm local configuration

PC farm disk policy

How to use the PBS batch facility

The software on board

How to use bbftpPRO for fast file transfers from other sites

Download a SSH GUI for Windows Version 3.2.9 and its 200 page manual

Last update: 17 Feb 2008