GIF: Fusion Research Group
M.A.U.R.I.
Multipurpose Application Unit for Research and Innovation
The Fusion Research Group has a multipurpose computational platform used for carried out numerical calculus and multiphysics simulations and storage theoretical & experimental data base from its several scientific and innovation projects.
The main server is called POLAR
The services offered into the platform are these ones:
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Remote access
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Secure storage of information
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Experimental data acquisition and control systems
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Interoperability between several operative systems
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Numerical calculus & multiphysics simulations
The free software used in the platform provides:
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System Stability
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Higher performance than other private alternatives
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Personalization
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Implementation of developed GIF codes into the platform
The components of the supercomputing-calculation platform are 3 machines and their general functions within the platform itself.
[Panda] Workstation
[Pandita] Portable workstation
[Polar] Calculus & multiphysics simulations server
[Panda] Desktop workstation PANDA
It has Gentoo GNU / Linux and Windows 7, is designed for the elaboration of heavy mechanical designs, multiphysics simulations, programming, data acquisition and interaction with TOKAMAK "T" diagnostic systems.
Hardware: 16GB RAM Memory, 6 Core AMD Processing, nVidia Quadro Graphics
Functions: Mechanical design (e.g. SolidWorks), 2D and 3D multiphysics simulations (eg SolidWorks, COMSOL), Simulations of electrical / electronic circuits (eg KiCAD), Data acquisition system and "T"
[POLAR] Calculus & multiphysics simulations server
A SGI Altix XE250 server, with Gentoo GNU / Linux OS, thanks to its superior processing capability, POLAR takes full advantage of its server capabilities for multi-physical or numerical-intensive simulations, as well as for storage of information.
Features: Memory 32GB RAM (DDR2 @ 667Mhz); Processing] 2x Intel Xeon CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz (8 cores in total); Storage 5x 697.5 GiB SATA-II RAID-5 Hardware (2790 GiB total)
Functions: Multi-physics 3D simulations (eg COMSOL Multiphysics); Numerical calculation (eg Octave); Intensive simulation codes (eg TBSiC, EGUN).
POLAR is the supercomputing calculation server:
Is located in the Informatic General Direction of the U.A.N.L., is used remotely by SSH mainly. In this server, most of the multiphysics simulations presented by the GIF were and actually being done.
Services: SSH OpenSSH 6.6.1p1-hpn14v4, OpenSSL 1.0.1g; Web lighttpd 1.4.35 (ssl), PHP 5.5.12; DB MariaDB 5.5.37; VNC TightVNC Server 1.3.10
Programs: GCC 4.8.2 (C, FORTRAN, C ++, etc.); COMSOL Multiphysics 4.0b; JAVA 7 (OpenJDK Runtime Environment [IcedTea 2.4.7]
[Pandita] Portable workstation
It has Gentoo GNU / Linux and Windows 7 as the main operating systems. Due to its power and portability it allows to be used for design of electronic circuits and mechanical design, as well as visualization of heavy simulations.
Hardware: 16GB RAM Memory; Intel Core i7 processing (4 cores); Graphics nVidia Quadro 880M
Functions: Design and debugging of electronic circuits (e.g. KiCAD); Mechanical design (e.g., SolidWorks); Programming (e.g. Emacs, JAVA); Display results (e.g. GNUPlot)
Partitioning
Polar has 5 750 GiB hard drives in a hardware RAID-5 configuration, giving a total of 3TB of storage managed via LVM (Logical Volume Manager), as shown in the table.
Under this configuration it is possible to resize live partitions without compromising system stability, Polar partition scheme:
Partition Mount point Size File Systems
/dev/sda1 /boot 100 MiB ext2
/dev/vpolar/gentoo / 500 MiB ext3 /dev/vpolar/gentoo-usr /usr 10 GiB ext4
/dev/vpolar/gentoo-var /var 10 GiB reiser4
/dev/vpolar/gentoo-tmp /tmp 10 GiB reiser4
/dev/vpolar/gentoo-opt /opt 10 GiB ext4
/dev/vpolar/modulos /lib/modules 200 MiB ext3
/dev/vpolar/home /home 1 TiB ext4
/dev/vpolar/swap 32 GiB
We have licenses of:
Software Licenses: Comsol Multiphysics, Solidworks, Intel Fortran 90
Operative GNU Licenses in POLAR.