What is the Lisa system

The Lisa system is a cluster computer consisting of several hundreds of multi-core nodes running the Linux operating system. The system is installed and maintained by SURFsara.

Research Capacity Computing Services (RCCS)

The Lisa system is used for the SURFsara service Research Capacity Computing Services (RCCS). RCCS is a SURFsara compute service for researchers coping with many large computational tasks. RCCS covers computing tasks which are typically characterized by a large amount of independent, moderately parallel, computing tasks. The tasks itself can be run in parallel on the computing system. RCCS is typically for those compute tasks which in practice cannot be run on either departmental or university computing systems, due to their size.

Participants

The following participants are involved in the Lisa system:

• The University of Amsterdam (UvA)
• The VU University Amsterdam (VU)
• The SURF organization (SURF, which has taken over from NWO)

System configuration

The Lisa system is constantly evolving and growing to satisfy the needs of the participants. At this moment the configuration is as follows:

Summary

CPU nodes

Total number of CPU cores 4704
Total amount of memory    30 TB
Total peak performance    263 TFlop/sec
Disk space                400 TB for the home file systems
Operating System          Debian Linux

GPU nodes 1080Ti

Total number of CPU cores    276
Total number of CUDA cores   329728
Total amount of memory       5.9 TB
Total peak performance (SP)  1,026 TFlop/sec
Total peak performance (DP)  32 TFlop/sec

GPU nodes Titan V

Total number of CPU cores    24
Total number of CUDA cores   10240
Total number of Tensor cores  1280
Total amount of memory       256 GB
Total peak performance (SP)  29.8 TFlop/sec
Total peak performance (DP)  14.9 TFlop/sec

GPU nodes Titan RTX

Total number of CPU cores    192
Total number of CUDA cores   36864
Total number of Tensor cores  4608
Total amount of memory       192 GB
Total peak performance (SP)  521 TFlop/sec
Total peak performance (DP)  16 TFlop/sec

Disk space                   400 TB for the home file systems
Operating System             Debian Linux
Interconnect                 40 Gbit/s ethernet

Managing Lisa

Most of the software that is used to manage the Lisa system is Open Source. We are using the following software to manage the system:

• CFEngine 3, A configuration engine
• As batch software we use Slurm.
• For monitoring we use Prometheus.
• SALI, SALI (Sara Automatic Linux Installer) is a tool that allows you to install Linux on multiple machines at once. It support several protocols for downloading by way of aria2 to install a machine. For example, BitTorrent and rsync are supported. SALI originates from SystemImager and still uses the same philosophy. It is a scalable method for performing unattended installation. SALI is mostly used in cluster setups.