Hardware: Computing Cluster

GM/CA @ APS computing environment has similar structure for all three beamlines: 23-ID-D, 23-ID-B and 23-BM. The two ID beamlines which are equipped with fast Pilatus3-6M and Eiger-16M detectors share ultrafast 1PB storage with BeeGFS distributed file system. The BM beamline equipped with Rayonix-300 CCD detector provides a 576TB shared storage with BeeGFS file system. The computing infrastructure of the ID beamlines clusters is shown on the picture below.

network
 

Users who log on the beamline workstations have their home directories on the storage array and thus all the workstations access the same home directory for a given user account. The storage capacity allows us to keep users data for three months after the experiment.

Computers at the ID beamlines are connected to internal 56Gbps fiber network and the workstations accessible from outside the lab (ws2, ws5, and ws6) are connected to 10Gbps uplink. The BM subnet is on 10Gbps fiber network.

Users are provided with two groups of workstations. One group is allocated for collecting and processing data on the day of experiment (day-1 workstations). These are blXws1, blXws2, blXws3, blXws6, and blXkeithley, where "X" stands for the beamline number ('1' for IDD, '2' for IDB, and '3' for BM). The other group (day-2 workstations) consisting of ws4, ws5, and ws7 is offered for those users who wish to continue processing or backing up their data after the experiment is over. At the ID beamlines there is one more group of workstations (ws8 to ws12 of IDD combined with ws8 to ws12 of IDB) which do not have monitors and keyboards for user access. They are used for automatic data processing from JBluIce.

All computers operate under CentOS-7, a freeware clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux operating system, and MATE graphical desktop environment. All of them have most common crystallographic data processing software packages installed including HKL3000/HKL2000, Phenix, PyMol, and etc.

The following computing policies are implemented:

 


GM/CA @ APS Sponsors: National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

  GM/CA @ APS is an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Argonne National Laboratory

  UChicago Argonne LLC | Privacy & Security Notice | Contact Us | A-Z Index | Search