Sol Quickstart User Guide
This "quickstart" user guide is designed to familiarize users with the latest upgrades on the Sol and Hawk clusters. Since these clusters share a head node, storage system, and software, we will refer to them as Sol throughout the guide.
Our goal is to provide a simple introduction to both the hardware and software on this machine so that researchers can start using it as quickly as possible.
Hardware
Sol is a highly heterogenous cluster, meaning that it is composed of multiple commodity hardware computing architectures and instruction sets. For our purposes, we have whittled these down to three categories. We list the architectures in reverse chronological order and give each of them an Lmod architecture name explained in the software section below.
- Intel Haswell (2013) uses
arch/haswell24v2 - Intel Cascade Lake (2019) uses
arch/cascade24v2 - Intel Ice Lake (2020) and higher uses
arch/ice24v2
Each architeture provides a distinct instruction set, and all compiled software on our cluster depends on these instructions. The architectures are backwards compatible, meaning that you can always use software compiled for an older architecture on newer hardware.