What is Zest?
Zest is a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster for campus researchers which supports tying together multiple compute nodes for research work that cannot be split into smaller components or fit within a single machine.
To facilitate this, Zest compute elements are interconnected with low-latency networking that pass information between nodes many times faster than traditional network technologies. Zest utilizes the SLURM scheduler, which allows researchers to scale jobs within the cluster and groups the nodes together as needed by the current jobs.
At its inception in 2020, Zest is made up of over 1000 cores and 6TB of memory across 31 interconnected nodes. Today, Zest is comprised of hundreds of thousands of cores and hundreds of terabytes of memory.
Connect With Us!
If you have a workload that is appropriate for Zest, or just have questions on what is possible, please let us know! You can also email us at researchcomputing@syr.edu.
We would be glad to connect with you to explore how we might be able to assist.
Zest Cluster Architecture
(All worker nodes have Infiniband interconnect)
| Hostname | Hardware | Function |
|---|---|---|
| node [1000-1011] | 80 CPUs, 187G memory each | Worker nodes (Dell) |
| node [1012-1023,1028-1030] | 36 CPUs, 188G memory each | Worker nodes (Supermicro) |
| node [1024-1027] | 36 CPUs, 188G memory, 2 GPUs each | GPU worker nodes |
Packages Installed on all Login and Worker Nodes
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| yasm | Modular Assembler |
| gnu8-compilers-ohpc | The GNU C Compiler and Support Files |
| ohpc-gnu8-io-libs | OpenHPC IO libraries for GNU |
| ohpc-autotools | OpenHPC autotools |
| openblas-gnu8-ohpc | An optimized BLAS library based on GotoBLAS2 |
| openmpi3-pmix-slurm-gnu8-ohpc | A powerful implementation of MPI |
| lmod-defaults-gnu8-openmpi3-ohpc | OpenHPC default login environments |
| imb-gnu8-openmpi3-ohpc | Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) |
| kernel-devel | Development package for building kernel modules |
| kernel-headers | Header files for the Linux kernel for use by glibc |
| dkms | Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework |
| libstdc++ | GNU Standard C++ Library |
| boost-gnu8-openmpi3-ohpc | Boost free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries |
| hwloc-ohpc | Portable Hardware Locality |
| scalapack-gnu8-openmpi3-ohpc | A subset of LAPACK routines |
| singularity-ohpc | Application and environment virtualization |
| gnuplot | A program for plotting mathematical expressions and data |
| motif-devel | Development libraries and header files |
| tcl-devel | Tcl scripting language development environment |
| tk-devel | Tk graphical toolkit development files |
| qt | Qt toolkit |
| qt-devel | Development files for the Qt toolkit |
| libXScrnSaver | X.Org X11 libXss runtime library |