Nov. 8, 2010: Robson will be decommissioned soon; do not start new projects on this facility.

About this QuickStart Guide

This QuickStart guide provides a brief overview of the WestGrid Robson facility, indicating its role within WestGrid and highlighting some of the features that distinguish it from other WestGrid resources. It is intended to be read by new WestGrid account holders and by current users considering whether to move to the Robson system.
For more detailed information about the Robson hardware and performance characteristics, available software, usage policies and how to log in and run jobs, follow the links given below.

Robson Overview

Robson is a Linux cluster which can be used for extended serial and parallel 64-bit computations. It is not as fast as some of the other WestGrid facilities, but, often has a shorter input queue. It is best suited to parallel computations without heavy interprocess communication demands.

Hardware

Processors

Robson is a 56-processor cluster consisting of an IBM JS20 BladeCenter with two chassis.

Each chassis is populated with 14 blades (nodes).

Each blade has two 1.6 GHz PowerPC 970 processors sharing 4 GB of memory. This is the same kind of processor as found in a Macintosh G5.

One blade is used as a login server, leaving 54 processors for computations. The computational nodes are named r2 through r28.

Interconnect

The interconnect between blades within a chassis is Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The two chassis are connected through four GigE uplinks.

Storage

Every compute node has a local 40 GB /tmp file system that can be used for scratch data. Note that this 40 GB partition is shared among all users of a given node.

Software

2010-11-13: Robson-related information regarding installed software, the operating and compilers has been removed from the main WestGrid software page, but, see that page if you are migrating off of Robson and need that kind of information about other WestGrid systems.

Parallel calculations are supported with MPI 2.

In general, numerical libraries on Robson have been compiled in 64-bit mode.

Using Robson

To log in to Robson, connect to robson.westgrid.ca using an ssh (secure shell) client. For more information about connecting and setting up your environment, see the QuickStart Guide for New Users.

A unique feature of the Robson user environment is that the WestGrid gridstore storage facility file systems (home, data and vault) are available directly on the Robson login (head) node. The data and vault files systems are not available on the computational nodes (r2 to r28), however. Thus, if jobs require files that are stored in the data and/or vault file systems, these files must be moved to the home file system first.

As on other WestGrid systems batch jobs are handled by a combination of TORQUE and Moab software.

A feature of the batch environment on Robson is a special queue for preemptible jobs (ones that write checkpoint files so that they can be restarted should they be interrupted by a higher priority job or system failure). For more information see Running Jobs.

Updated 2010-11-13.