SCV Computational Facilities

At the core of SCV's computational facilities are a number of advanced, multiprocessor computing systems. These systems are available to all University faculty members for research, as well as for educational use in computational science-related courses.

The University's newest and most powerful computing system is an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. This system comprises 1024 compute nodes, each containing a dual-processor PowerPC chip and 512 MB of memory. The peak performance of this system is 5.7 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second). This system was ranked 59th in the June 2005 TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Complementing the Blue Gene is a cluster of IBM pSeries parallel, shared-memory computers with a total of 184 processors. Four of the computers are IBM model p690 systems, powered by RS6000 Power4 processors, each running at 1.3 GHz, with 1 GB (gigabyte) of memory per processor. Three of the p690 computers have 32 processors and the fourth has 16. The remaining 72 processors comprise nine 8-processor, model p655 systems, powered by 1.1 or 1.7 GHz Power4 processors with either 1 or 2 GB of memory per processor. The peak performance of the entire pSeries cluster is nearly 1 TFLOPS.

In December, 2007 we made availabe the new Katana Cluster, comprised of 14 IBM LS21 blade servers, each with four 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron 2218HE processors. On July 1, 2008 eight additional blade servers were added, bringing the total number to 22. The Katana Cluster runs the BULinux 5.0 operating system.

The supercomputing facilities are further augmented with an Intel-based Linux cluster. This cluster consists of 52 dual-processor compute nodes and 24 graphics display nodes, all on a multi-gigabit/second Myrinet network. The graphics nodes drive a large-format, high-resolution display wall in the Computer Graphics Lab.

Data storage for these systems is provided by a 7 terabyte disk array and a robotic tape system capable of storing 150 terabytes.

These systems offer a wide range of programming languages, parallelizing compilers, mathematical and scientific libraries, graphics and visualization software, and discipline-specific application packages.

Our consulting staff, both scientific programmers and systems administrators, are available to help you with using all of our computational facilities and please don't hesitate to contact us for help.