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Linux Clusters

Overview Multiple Linux clusters are available 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 Linux clusters are available to the entire Boston University research community with 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. A broad set of software packages is available.
  • The use of high-performance computing systems can dramatically reduce the time to obtain solutions for computationally intensive problems.
Key Features
  • Access to an IBM BladeCenter (known as the “Katana Cluster”) comprised of 99 blade servers with 588 processors
  • Usage and programming assistance from our system administrators and scientific programming staff
  • Optimal for single processor and up to 8-way parallel applications in a shared memory environment or up to 32-way parallel jobs in message passing applications using a high-speed (Infiniband) interconnect
  • Intel and AMD processors in a Linux environment that supports a rich set of Open Source and 3rd party tools and applications
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.
Cost No charge to the BU community.
There is a charge to industrial partners.
Getting Started