The UITS Steel Cluster
Note: On June 30, 2008, UITS will retire Steel. No new accounts will be created after March 31, 2008. Steel is replaced by IU's newest supercomputer, Quarry. For more, see About the Steel retirement.
Configuration
The Steel Cluster consists of nine Sun UE2e V100 compute nodes running Solaris 2.8. Each machine has a 500 MHz UltraSPARC2 processor and 1GB memory. Two additional Sun V120 systems serve as disk servers for the cluster.
Steel's primary purpose is to provide an interactive, general-purpose Unix computing environment for academic use. While research computing tools are available, instructional and general-purpose computing take precedence. CPU-intensive jobs requiring more than 20 minutes of CPU time should be run on dedicated research systems, such as the Libra Cluster or AVIDD Clusters. Steel processes exceeding the 20-minute limit will be aborted.
In addition to the compute and disk nodes, the Steel cluster has a silent partner: the applications server named Forge. Users do not login to Forge; but, rather access the applications and services provided by Forge to the front end Steels; this allows for consistency across all of the Steel nodes.
Accounts
Steel accounts are available to all IU faculty, staff and students. To create one, visit the Account Management Service at:
https://itaccounts.iu.edu/
After you log in (using your Network ID username and passphrase), click create more accounts. Follow the instructions to create your Steel accoun t. It may take up to six hours for your request to be processed.
If you have questions about the account request process, please contact your campus Support Center.
Software
Support
The Steel Cluster is administered and supported by the High Performance Systems group of UITS, hps-admin@iu.edu. Questions about statistical or mathematical software should be directed to the Stat/Math Center. Questions about IMSL or NAGlib should be directed to High Performance Applications group, hpa@indiana.edu. General questions about the use of Unix should be directed to the Unix Systems Support Group.
