About Computation
At the core of SCV’s computational facilities are a number of advanced, multiprocessor supercomputing 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 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.
In December, 2007 we made available the Katana Cluster, which has since been expanded and is made up of machines of several configurations. The cluster currently has 99 blades with a combined 588 processors. The Katana Cluster runs the BULinux 5.0 operating system.
Since 2002, we have also had a cluster of IBM pSeries parallel, shared-memory computers with a total of 72 processors. However, these machines will be decommissioned as of June 1, 2012 so all users of them should be migrating to the Katana Cluster as soon as possible.
From 2003 to early 2012, we also had an Intel Pentium III Linux Cluster. This cluster has now been retired.
Data storage for these systems is provided by a 84 terabyte disk array and a robotic tape system capable of storing 935 terabytes (current configuration provides 500 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.