The IT Division is proud to announce that we are now housing and administering a centralized Campus Research Grid that is available to all UNR researchers for projects involving massive amounts of data.

Researchers can run research simulations on the grid at a much lower cost than setting up their own computer cluster.

IT provides the server rack, an air-conditioned server room, a head node, file server, and a research grid systems administrator.

Currently, the cluster contains 63 computation nodes, with a combined 312 gigabytes of RAM and 252 processor cores, supplemented by a 24-terabyte file server.

Grid Queing System

IT uses an enterprise-grade queuing system to make sure jobs are run in the fairest and most efficient way possible. The Sun Grid Engine chooses whose job to run based on past usage and priority. Those who own nodes have top priority on the nodes they own. If someone does not own nodes, their job will attempt to run in the common pool. If unavailable, they will run on anyone’s idle nodes. However, if the owner of the nodes submits a job, those “guest” jobs are put on hold until the owner’s job is complete.That way, researchers always have 100 percent access to the nodes that they buy.

The common pool is not owned by anybody and no one gets priority there. To make sure those resources are fairly distributed, all departments get an equal share of time, all groups within a department get an equal share of the department’s time, unless the department chair directs otherwise, and all users in a group get an equal share of the group’s time, unless the professor directs otherwise.

Contact Us

To find out more about the research grid, contact John Kenyon, UNR Research Grid Systems Administrator, at 682-5041.