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We offer two computing systems, Maia and Sol and High Performance Computing clusters, and a Ceph-based storage cluster for the Lehigh Research Community.
- Maia: a 32-core SMP system is available at no-charge (Service Level 1)
- Sol: a 8193-node High Performance Computing Cluster (Service Level 2)Computing Cluster. Sol is a condominium cluster and can be expanded by interested research groups by investing in the Condo Program.
- Hawk: a 34-node High Performance Computing Cluster funded by the National Science Foundation's Campus Cyberinfrastructure Award 2019035
- Ceph: a 600TB combined 2019TB storage cluster based on the Ceph distributed storage system.
The computing and data storage resources are available for use in the classroom for registrar scheduled courses. See Teaching Uses below.
Download Flyers HPC and Services
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All users of Lehigh's research computing systems must obtain an account for their exclusive use with their |
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In publications, reports, and presentations that utilize Research Computing Services |
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, please acknowledge Lehigh University with the following statement: "Portions of this research were conducted with research computing resources provided by Lehigh University" |
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Also, providing the Research Computing group with a list of publications, students graduated, their thesis/dissertation title, and grants received based on work done on Research Computing resources is strongly recommended. |
Research uses of Research Computing Systems
Service Level 1 (no charge)
Service Level 1 An HPC account provides access to Maia (32-core, 128GB SMP) to the entire university community for batch-scheduled use. Access to Maia is provided by the Polaris gateway host, where users can create their batch scripts for submission. No direct SSH access to Maia is supported, and GUI-based codes cannot be run there.
Each HPC Service Level 1 user has a home directory storage quota of 5GB. Scratch storage of 4TB is available on Maia (at /scratch/userid). Users may use this scratch storage for temporary storage of data while their jobs are running. The scratch filesystem cannot be used for long-term storage of any data; all data older than 14 days will be deleted.
Maia will reach its targeted end of life on June 30, 2017. As of Jan 2017, there is no decision made on retiring or replacing Maia. Please consider this if you are using Maia for your computational needs to support grant funded research.
Account Request: To obtain a HPC account on Maia, please use the Account Request Form and select "FREE Linux command-line computing.
Service Level 2 (fee-based allocations)
Service Level 2 HPC account provides access to Sol, a 81-node condo cluster for research. Sol and Hawk. A faculty member may obtain access to Sol and Hawk by purchasing submitting a minimum allocation of 50,000 core-hours or service units (SU) for $500. Additional allocations can be purchased in increments of 10,000 SUs for $100 each. An allocation cycle begins on Oct. 1 and ends on Sep. 30 of the next year and will not roll over to the next allocation cycle. At launch, there are 1,400,000 SUs available per allocation cycle. Faculty members who require more computing time or want a gauranteed share of total available computing time annually should consider a Condo Investment.
The faculty member or PI can request additional accounts sharing the same allocation for an annual charge of $50 (each). Each service level 2 user has a home directory quota of 150GB.
proposal for allocation to the Research Computing Steering Committee (RCSC). There are several types of allocation depending on your needs as described in the Accounts & Allocation page.
Account Request: To obtain a an HPC account or allocation or both on Sol, the Faculty sponsoring the user account should contact submit an allocation request using on the forms available at Accounts & Allocation page. If a Faculty already has an active allocation, then please email the Manager of Research Computing for more informationto add additional users to your allocation.
Ceph Storage
In Fall 2018, Research Computing deployed a refreshed 600TB 768TB Ceph Storage solution. Faculty, Departments, Centers and Colleges can purchase a Ceph project in units of 1TB. . In Fall 2020, Ceph was augmented by an additional 796TB from Hawk and 455TB by LTS for a total of 2PB storage cluster.
- Data is replicated on across three disks on three nodes, secured against simultaneous failure of two full nodes in the EWFM cluster.
- Ceph software performs self-healing (maintaining three replicas) if one or two replicas are lost due to disk or node failure.
- Ceph software performs daily and weekly data scrubbing to ensure replicas remain consistent to avoid bit rot.
- Data which is deleted is NOT recoverable.
- Data is NOT protected against catastrophic cluster failures or loss of the EWFM datacenter.
Research groups can opt for backup of data to a secondary Ceph cluster in which case
- Data is stored on two distinct clusters in two locations. The primary cluster is located in the EWFM datacenter, the backup in the Packard datacenter.
- Data is replicated on across three disks on three nodes in each cluster, secured against simultaneous failure of two full nodes in either cluster or simultaneous failure of five nodes in both clusters.
- Ceph software performs self-healing (maintaining three replicas) if one or two replicas are lost due to disk or node failure.
- Ceph software performs daily and weekly data scrubbing to ensure replicas remain consistent to avoid bit rot.
- Data is snapshotted and stored weekly.
- Data is protected in the event of catastrophic failure of the primary cluster or loss of the EWFM datacenter, so long as the Packard site remains operational.
Ceph Charges
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Ceph Charges
- There are no charges if requesting a storage allocation from the RCSC. Storage allocations that are not renewed or approved annually will be deleted and no backups will be kept.
- Ceph projects can be purchased for a 5 year duration at a rate of $375/TB. No snapshots and backups provided.
- PIs can request snapshots and backups to a secondary cluster for an additional $375/TB (5 year duration).
HPC Research groups and Ceph
Research groups that purchase a minimum of 1TB Ceph project for a 5 year duration have the option of using their Ceph projects space as their home directory on Sol. PIs who opt for Ceph projects as home directory forgoing the 150GB home storage quota provided by the $50/user account fee will have their annual user fees waived for the life of the Ceph project. Such PIs can add users to their Sol allocation at no charge during the 5 year life of the Ceph projectEach Principle Investigator is provided with a 1TB ceph space for his/her research group. If additional space is requested, please include a justification in your compute allocation request or explicitly request a storage allocation. This storage exists as long as your allocation is active and will be deleted (no backups kept) a month after your allocation expires. If you purchase a Ceph project, then your storage will exist for 5 years irrespective of your compute allocation status.
Account Request: To obtain purchase a Ceph project, please contact Manager of Research Computing for more information.
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Prospective Investors should review the Condo Program before contacting HPC for investing in Sol.
Additional Storage: Additional storage (Level 1 & 2) is available by purchasing a Ceph project volume @ $375/TB for 5 years. To request additional home directory storage, please submit request to http://lts.lehigh.edu/help.
Definition of One Core-hour/Service Unit/SU: 1 hour of computing on 1 core. The base compute node on Sol with 20 cores will consume 20 SUs per hour of computing.More Information: The Research Computing wiki contains details on using the HPC resources, and can be accessed from on-campus locations or via VPN). Polaris and Service Level 2 resources are accessible via ssh. SSH clients are available on all Linux distributions and on MacOS (via Terminal.app). Windows SSH/SFTP clients are available from software.lehigh.edu.
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Faculty members considering use of research computing facilities for teaching purposes should submit a request at http://www.lehigh.edu/go/rchelp request an Education Allocation at least eight weeks prior to the class start date with an anticipated enrollment count, a proposed syllabus, and details of their proposed use of HPC systems.
Service Level 1 Research Computing Resource
There is no charge to use Level 1 research computing resource. A Level 1 account gives access to Maia (32 core, 128GB SMP) for batch-scheduled use. Access to Maia is provided by the Polaris gateway host, where users can create their batch scripts for submission. No direct SSH access to Maia is supported, and GUI-based codes cannot be run there. To request an account for your course, all students registered or auditing the course will need to request an account by visiting the Account Request page. Each account will have a home directory quota of 5GB. If additional storage is required for coursework, a Ceph Project volume will need to be requested at $200/TB/year. To request additional storage, please submit request to http://www.lehigh.edu/go/rchelp with class roster. Instructors who use Maia for credited courses should be aware that there will be no reservations created to accommodate increased usage for completing assignments, projects and other course related workloads.
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These accounts are typically associated with a rostered course, and last for the duration of that course (up to one semester). The course instructor can Faculty should request these accounts for his/her students, and the department offering the course is responsible for paying the associated fees. requests by TA's or department coordinators will be denied. Faculty are encouraged to submit a final report at the end of the semester to help us improve services provided for teaching.
A course allocation provides 1TB Ceph space and an allocation based on number of students in the course. The fee is broken down as follows
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- Provides 500 SU/student.
- A course with 10 students will thus have a total allocation of 5000 SU that is shared among all students in the course.
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Faculty can request storage only education allocations (please justify storage > 1TB).
Instructors requiring assistance with estimating total or per student SU requirements for the course should contact Research Computing Staff at least 4 weeks prior to beginning of the semester.
Usage Policy: Student accounts cannot be shared and will be active until two weeks past the end of the semester. All compute intensive tasks must be submitted via the batch scheduler. We reserve the right to suspend accounts of users who run compute intensive jobs on the Sol login node. On request, LTS Research Computing staff will guest lecture on how to use the resource, write and submit job scripts and monitor jobs. Compute intensive task is defined as any operation on the HPC resource other than editing, copying, moving or deleting files, submitting and monitoring jobs and issuing simple commands such as ls, cp, mv, mkdir, rm, tail, tar, gzip/gunzip, more, cat and less. All student data not saved in the Ceph project space will be purged when accounts are deactivated.
Ceph Storage Resource
Faculty can request a Ceph project to provide storage resources for coursework independent of accounts on Research Computing clusters. The cost of a Ceph allocation is $200/TB/year and must be paid by the department offering the course. Any request for a Ceph volume for course work will need to be accompanied by
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