The following provides general information about use of the cluster by members of the School, and in particular about obtaining an account.

Brief machine details
Silica is a 600-core rack mounted cluster. There are 74 compute nodes, each having two Intel Xeon quad-core processors, and 16GB of memory, as well as a head node which handles interactive use and storage. The facility is suitable both for shared and distributed memory parallel computing. Further details of the facility are available on the silica web site.

Advice and help
Please note that the School's Scientific Computational Officer, Sue Yang, is available to give users advice on/help users with using silica. Sue's Advanced Scientific Computing web pages provide details of support available.

See also the Local IT Support web pages for general computing support.

Obtaining an account
Accounts are available for the machine. At present there are no restrictions on this process. To obtain an account you must have the approval of an academic supervisor, agree to pay a nominal fee ($100 per year for the account), have the approval of the local co-ordinator for the facility, and agree to the conditions for use outlined on the web site. The $100 fee will come from a finance account within the University system, associated either with a staff member's research grant or a School maintenance account.

To request an account, please download and fill in the form available from the conditions for use page of the cluster web site, and then give the form to Tony Monger (room 329 in A28). Tony will collect all forms and then the Physics co-ordinator Iver Cairns will sign them and forward them to Richard Leow, the system administrator for silica. Please note that filling in the form implies an agreement to pay the $100 fee, and that an academic supervisor needs to be a signatory. Tony will organise collection of fees from research groups for all accounts opened, on an annual basis.

Issues
There may be minor issues with the machine, but it is available and should be used. One issue is that the machine may be shut down in very hot weather in the event of the failure of the chiller. The silica web site has a news page which supplies up-to-date information on availability and issues.

The Physics co-ordinator for silica is Iver Cairns. All enquiries should be directed to him.