A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
March 2009
NA-ASC-500-09—Issue 10
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Kansas City Plant Acquires Tri-Lab Capacity Cluster Platform
As reported in the December 2008 issue of this newsletter, Kansas City Plant (KCP) has leveraged the work done by the three NNSA defense laboratories in an effort to bring forward the next generation of capacity platforms to the Nuclear Weapons Complex.
During KCP’s initial visit to Sandia on June 19, 2008 to discuss the possibility of KCP getting a small Tri Lab Capacity Cluster (TLCC) system for a production role at their site, Sandia’s TLCC personnel gave briefings on platform and deployment issues. With the help of Lawrence Livermore and Appro (the system vendor), KCP ultimately bought a 34 node compute cluster under the LLNL TLCC subcontract.
In September of 2008, KCP’s cluster was ready for initial load testing at the vendor facility. Sandia ran the complete Pre-ship TLCC Synthetic Work Load (SWL) against the machine. The system was then shipped to KCP where Appro performed the site integration. Sandia personnel were granted accounts and access to the KCP system and performed the Post-ship SWL to validate the machine. Shortly thereafter, KCP administrators spent a week at Sandia training to “install and set up TOSS” on their machine. KCP left this training session with enough tools to be self-sufficient with the day-to-day operations of their cluster. Finally, Sandia assisted KCP with many tasks (e.g., resource manager setup) to help get their machine into production and provide on-going support as needed.
At the TriPod Workshop on Common Computing Environment held January 13th in Albuquerque, Jim Mahoney, KCP Plant TLCC Development Lead thanked the entire ASC team: “I want to summarize by saying we are very pleased with the TLCC machine and I thank you for all of the support that we have had from the tri-lab.”
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