The Oak Sun Cluster is an 8 node distributed memory multi-processor system. Each node of the cluster contains two UltraSPARC-IIIi 1GHz processors with 2 GB of RAM per node. The nodes are interconected with Gigabit Ethernet (60-110 Mbytes/sec bandwidth, 50-200 usecs latency). The Oak Sun cluster uses Solaris as its operating system. It is an interactive system; when a user logs in to oak.itc.virginia.edu, she or he will be placed onto one of the nodes oak1.itc.virginia.edu through oak8.itc.virginia.edu. It is possible to log in directly to specific nodes if one of the nodes is less busy than others.
Because of its relatively small number of cpus, the Oak cluster is not appropriate for parallel jobs. It should be used for serial jobs.
Obtaining
a Research Computing Account
Information about and criteria for obtaining research computing enabled
account to access the Oak Sun Cluster. If you already have a research computing enabled account, you should proceed to the tutorial below.
Available Software
Sun Compilers
Sun Pro Fortran 77/90 and C/C++ compilers.TotalView Debugger
A graphical debugger for applications written in C/C++ or Fortran 77/90.IMSL F90 MP Libraries
The IMSL numerical libraries are a collection of over 1000 Fortran (F90 and F77) routines that implement algorithms useful in mathematical and statistical analysis.Research Computing Software Environments
ITC licenses the Solaris version of most of its mathematical and statistical software environments including Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, IDL, and Ansys. For long running, computation intensive tasks, these environments can be run in batch mode on the Oak Sun cluster. The precise method of setting up a run for batch mode depends upon the software; usually, a script file is prepared and the software is invoked with certain command-line options. When running in batch mode it is helpful to use the nohup command; this suppresses the terminate-upon-exit signal that would normally be sent when the user logs out.For example, to run a Matlab job in batch mode, the appropriate command would be
nohup matlab -nojvm -nodesktop -nodisplay -r "matlab_script;exit" -logfile matlab_log &