Neptune is an Opteron Cluster in the Department of Civil Engineering at North Carolina State University and is the oldest of the three compute clusters in our research group. Besides Neptune, I administer another 88-core Opteron Cluster and a 10-node IBM Cluster.

Visit Neptune's website for more details. This page summarizes my contributions related to the cluster a few years ago, left here for historical reasons. 

Planning and Deployment

• Assessed our research group needs and identified specific hardware and software requirements.

• Analyzed various hardware and software choices and recommended purchase decisions.

• Deployed the hardware and performed initial configuration. 

Programming Environment

• Installed and configured MPICH and MPICH2, supporting both MPI and MPI-2 standards. Performed requisite configuration for using intra-node communication for processes residing on same node.

• Installed AMD core math library (ACML) which incorporates BLAS, LAPACK and FFT routines. 

Benchmarking and Optimization

• Conducted extensive benchmarking using High performance Linpack(HPL).

• Achieved a peak performance of 68.34 GFLOPS using 22 processors during preliminary benchmarking.

• Further optimization involving HPL parameter tweaking for our specific architecture was done.

• Achieved a peak performance of 76 GFLOPS with HPL(Linpack) while solving a solving a 70K x 70K dense matrix, corresponding to 78% of the theoretical peak.

• Analyzed the performance of other benchmarks like High Performance Computing Challenge(HPCC) and NAS benchmarks. 

Matlab and Distributed Computing

• Installed the core Matlab environment and configured the Distributed Computing Toolbox(DCT).

• Configured and deployed the Distributed Computing Engine(DCE) on the master and compute nodes on the cluster.

• Conducted benchmarking of the Distributed computing features. Results are available at Neptune website. 

Scheduler and Resource Manager

• Achieved control over batch jobs and distributed compute nodes using Torque.

• Configured Maui  as the default job scheduler.
  

• Configured and enforced basic Quality of Service(QoS) policies.

Source Configuration Management

• Configured Subversion repository for the Cyberinfrastructure project encompassing individual sub-projects within the research group.

• Manage periodic release cycles. 

Content Management System

• Configured and deployed a Drupal installation for content management.