CSL: Facilities: Cluster Computers

The C. S. Department maintains a small cluster of 30 (160 cores) machines for general computing. The machines are in a round-robin DNS configuration, and can be accessed by using the alias linux.cs.duke.edu. The cluster is comprised of the following machine configurations:

2x Dell R610 with 2x E5540 Xeon Processor, 2.53GHz 8M Cache (96GB RAM - 8 cores)

10x Dell R610 with 2 E5640 Xeon Processor, 2.66GHz 12M Cache (64GB RAM - 8 hyperthreaded cores)

8x Dell R610 with 2 E5540 Xeon Processor, 2.53GHz 8M Cache (48GB RAM - 8 cores)

1x Sun SunFire X4600 with 8x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 885 (64GB RAM - 16 cores)

10x SUN Fire X4100 M2 X64 Model 2220 (2.8GHZ/1MB) (>= 16GB RAM - 4 cores)

The machines are set up to use Sun Grid Engine for batch job submission. Please see the lab instructions for using this system. The compute cluster machines are on a 3-4 year replacement cycle, so any machine in the cluster should be no more than four years old.

Please be aware that compute cluster machines are not backed up. Users should copy any important data to filesystems that are backed up to avoid losing data.