Resources

The Farr have 88 nodes of type R (formerly known as U), specification:

• 16 Ivy Bridge cores @ 2.6GHz 
• 64GB RAM 
• 2TB hard drives 
• QDR Infiniband capable (restricted to 36 node islands) 
• 10GBps networking capable for future network upgrades.  

These nodes currently have access to a maximum of 340TB of Scratch storage with 40Gbps throughput. Files can be transferred between Legion and Research Data Storage via Legion's dedicated data transfer node. All nodes have four years warranty as required by the Farr institute. 

Software

The above machines will be operated with Legion's software stack (OS, applications, etc.). As a matter of course, all Legion users are free to install software in their own home directories if they wish; however, the Research Computing Platforms team are here to help as much as possible with getting software installed centrally on Legion where it can be used by everyone. Further, we are also happy to work with local IT staff to help them install and manage packages on behalf of their departments or groups. The Farr may wish to consider such an arrangement whereby packages commonly used by Farr researchers are managed and maintained by a nominated member of the collaboration who can work closely with the Research Computing Platforms team to manage a Farr software area. 

Job Prioritisation and Scheduling

The Farr nodes will be commanded via Legion's batch system - if Farr researchers submit a volume of work beyond what their allocated resources can process, a queue will develop and their jobs will be scheduled to run in the future by order of arrival. In this case, if suitable machines outside of the Farr's allocation become available, then Farr's jobs will run on these additional resources, increasing overall processing throughput for this group. Farr researchers will have dedicated access to these nodes as per our default policy CRAG dedicated resource policy: when not in use by Farr institute researchers, these nodes will be used for to run small jobs owned by other researchers according to the current CRAG policy. This is to maximise utilisation of this resource, as idle time is very costly in terms of energy efficiency (typically, idle power consumption is 1/2 of maximum). 

Getting Access

All Legion users are required to have UCL userid for identity and authorisation purposes. UCL Farr PIs’ may obtain UCL userids for ‘external’ Far collaborators via standard Departmental processes. The Legion scheduler and other systems management tools do not distinguish between ‘Staff’ userids and ‘Visitor’ or other userids in the allocation of resources. Training and Support Extensive online support materials are available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/services/research-it/research-computing. All Legion users benefit from access to expert technical user support via the email address rc-support@ucl.ac.uk. The Research Computing Group will be happy to discuss any specialist training and assistance that may be needed by Farr researchers.

Farr London will have access to at least 300TB of high performance data storage in the form of GPFS allocation. A significant capacity increase can be provided by re-allocating high performance allocations to lower performance/higher capacity storage. The UCL Research Data Storage allocations to Farr researchers include all service and maintenance charges and are administered by the RDS team. 

Allocations are provided as 'shares' to projects rather than individuals and a small amount of information is collected during a registration process (which takes generally 10 mins to complete). There are guidelines and assistance for this process together with access guidance should the users require it.

Presently only those with UCL credentials can access the high performance protocols, primarily via SSH clients like winSCP. External users can be provided evaluation 'cloud' access services to our storage but this is not automatic and requires a small additional account configuration.

Primary Investigators who are responsible for projects within Farr London are requested to complete this registration and provide authority, by way of nomination, to all those individuals they grant access to the project allocation 'share'. They will also be the primary contact for service notices unless delegated to a secondary contact.

Access to IDHS is given on a study by study basis. The PI applies for a 'share' for their study and each individual applies for an account to access that study. An individual can have access to many studies, based on the PIs approval. Because of the Information Governance around this the application process requires signatures on paper forms.