Usage Guidelines
Tigressdata is a shared resource with sixteen processing cores (four-socket Intel Xeon X7350, 2,93GHz), and has 128 GB of memory. And, as its name implies, tigressdata also has fiber connectivity to tigress-hsm, our large hierarchical/archival storage system, along with NFS connectivity to selected parallel or scratch storage spaces allocated to the other Princeton clusters. The system's resources and connectivity make it ideal for doing post-processing analysis of data that has been migrated to tigress-hsm, and several commercial and open-source packages are installed on this system.
Job Scheduling
There is no batch scheduler running on tigressdata, and while the only usage limit imposed is a 64GB memory limit per process, users are urged to avoid launching processes that will overburden the system. Before launching any memory- or compute-intensive tasks, please check
cat /proc/loadavg
cat /proc/meminfo
The first three values in the loadavg output are running averages of the system load for the last one, five and 15 minutes. Oversubscribing the system with CPU-bound tasks will severely compromise throughput for all users. The MemFree field of the meminfo output is the most important to check before launching a task with a large memory footprint. However, if the SwapFree is significantly less than the SwapTotal value, then performance is already compromised, and adding another memory-intensive task will only exacerbate the problem.
Again, please be mindful that tigressdata is a shared resource for all users.
