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IBM Blue Gene

Overview The Scientific Computing and Visualization group provides a massively parallel IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for research computing. This system is available, with certain restrictions, to all University faculty members, their students, and their collaborators for research and for educational use in courses related to computational science.
Available To Students, Faculty, Researchers, External Research Collaborators, Industrial Partners
Benefits
  • The Blue Gene/L is a large-scale shared resource that would be impractical for a small group or individual to own and operate. Clients bear no direct cost for the acquisition, maintenance, or use of the resource.
  • Professional staff are available to help with the use of the systems and to provide programming assistance with serial and parallel applications.
  • The use of high-performance computing systems can dramatically reduce the time to obtain solutions for computationally intensive problems.
Key Features
  • Access to the 1024-node IBM Blue Gene/L, a massively parallel computing system
  • High-speed, parallel data paths to high-performance disk arrays providing fast access to very large data sets
  • Usage and programming assistance from our system administrators and scientific programming staff
  • The architecture of the Blue Gene is primarily useful for parallel codes that scale well to hundreds of processors. It is most suitable for MPI (distributed memory, message passing) applications which can take advantage of large numbers of processes.
  • Many third-party software packages, such as MATLAB, are not available.
Requirements
  • Must be a member of a Scientific Computing Facilities (SCF) research project
    • BU faculty and full-time research staff are allowed to create SCF research projects and serve as Principal Investigators.
    • Principal Investigators may add collaborators (students, researchers outside of BU, etc.) to their SCF research project.
  • Those who wish to use the Blue Gene resource must verify their country of citizenship, since a limited set of countries are banned from use under US federal law. Access from those countries is also disallowed.
Cost No charge to the BU community.
There is a charge to industrial partners.
Getting Started