The University of Alberta has one of the most powerful HPC facilities in Canada. The system, called Aurora is an SGI Origin 2000 Supercompter. Since the University of Alberta is a member of MACI-2, the University of Lethbridge qualifies for access to Aurora at no charge.
Due to a MACI decision to reduce the wait time for accessing the facility, the allowable run-time for a job has been reduced to 168 hours (7 days) as of September 1, 1999. The runtime limit will be reduced even futher on October 1, 1999, providing 24 hours of program run-time. If your program exceeds these time restrictions, a program should be written with checkpoints which will allow processing to continue at a future time when the job is resubmitted.
Since the facility is designed for computationally intensive work, it is necessary that users submit their processing jobs via LSF (Load Sharing Facility). There are conditions where a user can process jobs interactively for debugging purposes, but it should be noted that jobs processed interactively receive a very low priority on the system and hence take much more time to process than if submitted through LSF.
The facility consists of:
- SGI Origin 2000 with 44 processors
- 10.5 GB RAM
- 90 GB Disk Storage
Software
| Operating System | IRIX64 |
| Compilers | C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Fortran 95 |
| Others | IRIS Explorer, AXIOM, Genstat 5, GLIM 4, Fastflo, PVM, MPI |
| Libraries | Mark 17-Fortran 77, Mark 2-Fortran 90, Mark 4-C Library, Mark 2-Parallel Library |
Accounts
To apply for an account on the system, contact:
Ron Senda
Team Leader, Research Computing Support,
Computing and Network Services, University of Alberta
Email: ron.senda@ualberta.ca
Tel: 403-492-9350
Fax: 403-492-1729
Technical Support
If you require technical support for Aurora, please contact:
Research Support
research.support@ualberta.ca
Tel: 403-492-9350
Fax: 403-492-1729
Local Documentation is also available.
Full demonstration is also available.