Difference between revisions of "Grid5000:Home"

Major update of BIOS and other firmwares and future strategy

In the recent months, we have performed a campaign of firmware updates (BIOS, Network interface Cards, RAID adapters…) of the nodes of most Grid'5000 clusters.

Those updates improved the overall reliability of our deployment process, but they also included mitigations for security issues such as Spectre/Meltdown.

It was also an opportunity to align clusters with similar hardware on the same firmware versions.

Unfortunately, we understand that those changes may have an impact on your experiments (particularly in terms of performance). This is a difficult issue where there is no good solution, as it is often hard or impossible to downgrade BIOS versions.

However, those firmware versions are included in the reference API. We recommend that you use this information to track down changes that could affect your experiment.

For instance, in https://api.grid5000.fr/stable/sites/nancy/clusters/gros/nodes/gros-1.json?pretty=1 , see bios.version and firmware_version.

You can also browse previous versions using the API ¹, or using the Github commit history ²

We will continue to update such firmwares in the future, about twice a year, keeping similar hardware in sync, and documenting the versions in the reference API.

¹: https://api.grid5000.fr/doc/3.0/reference/spec.html#get-3-0-item-uri-versions

²: https://github.com/grid5000/reference-repository/commits/master

-- Grid'5000 Team 16:15, March 27th 2020 (...

Support for persistent memory (PMEM)

Grid'5000 now features, among the different technologies it provides, some nodes with persistent memory.

Please find an introduction and some documentation on how to experiment on the persistent memory technology in the PMEM page.

-- Grid'5000 Team 17:35, February 19th 2020 (CET)

New cluster "troll" available in Grenoble

We have the pleasure to announce that a new cluster called "troll" is available in Grenoble¹.

It features 4 Dell R640 nodes with 2 Intel® Xeon® Gold 5218, 16 cores/CPU, 384GB DDR4, 1.5 TB PMEM (Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory)²³, 1.6 TB NVME SSD, 10Gbps Ethernet, and 100Gb Omni-Path.

Energy monitoring⁴ is available for this cluster, provided by the same devices used for the other clusters in Grenoble.

This cluster has been funded by the PERM@RAM project from Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (CNRS/INS2I grant).

¹: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Grenoble:Hardware

²: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/quick-start-guide-configure-intel-optane-dc-persistent-memory-on-linux

³: https://docs.pmem.io/persistent-memory/

⁴: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Energy_consumption_monitoring_tutorial

-- Grid'5000 Team 17:00, February 3rd 2020 (CET)

New cluster available in Nancy: grue (20 GPUs)

We have the pleasure to announce that the Grue cluster in Nancy¹ (production queue) is now available:

It features 5 Dell R7425 servers nodes with four Tesla T4², 128 GB DDR4, 1x480 GB SSD, 2 x AMD EPYC 7351, 16 cores/CPU

As this cluster features 4 GPU per node, we remind you that you can monitor GPU (and node) usage using the Ganglia tool (std environment only) and looking a the grue nodes.

If your experiments do not require all the GPU of a single node, it is possible to reserve resources at the GPU level³ (also see this previous news for some examples).

You can also use the nvidia-smi and htop commands on your reserved nodes to get more information about your GPU and CPU usage.

This cluster has been funded by Ihe CPER LCHN project (Langues, Connaissances & Humanités Numériques, Contrat de plan État / Région Lorraine 2015-2020), and the LARSEN and MULTISPEECH teams at LORIA / Inria Nancy Grand Est.

As a reminder, since this cluster is part of the "production" queue, specific usage rules apply.

¹: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Hardware

²: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Center/tesla-t4/t4-tensor-core-datasheet-951643.pdf

³: https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Accelerators_on_Grid5000#Reserving_GPU_uni...