High Performance Computing (HPC) Partnership
The High Performance Computing (HPC) Partnership is a unique consortium of faculty who require high capacity, high performance computing resources to be able to maintain and enable state-of-the-art, world-leading funded research.
The HPC Partnership's mission is to provide high-capacity, high performance computational facilities and to keep them updated through active cost-sharing between the university, IT Services, colleges and departments, the faculty, and through supporting grants. The combination of bright, motivated research faculty and expert HPC training and consulting support in conjunction with the HPC facilities enables successful accomplishment of this mission.
Facilities
Current computational facilities provided by the HPC Partnership include:
- Lightning, a 592-processor cores (148 nodes) 2.4 GHz, dual processor, dual core AMD 280 Opteron cluster with 2 GB of memory per processor core, and using the very high performance InfiniPath HTX interconnect technology.The cluster has 8 GB of memory per node for a total of 1184 GB of memory. Each node has a 160 GB SATA disk drive for system software and for local storage.Nodes are interconnected with a Qlogic 144-port InfiniBand switch using InfiniPath HTX cards and four 48-port managed Gigabit Ethernet switches.There is 15 Terabytes of RAID-5 storage.The peak performance of each processor is 4.8 Gflops so 592 processors gives a peak performance of 2,842 gigaflops (2.842 teraflops).
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32-processor SGI Origin 2000 with 40 GB of shared memory
and 600 GB of local disk space..
Each processor is a 300 MHz MIPS R12000 microprocessor with peak performance of 600 megaflops.
These facilities are supporting approximately $3.5 million per year in research grants from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other granting organizations.
Members
Faculty in the HPC Partnership develop usage policies for existing machines, write bid specifications for new machines, and select new machines.
Research
The following are just a few examples of the research being done on the HPC Partnership equipment:
Mark Bryden, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering uses the HPC Partnership's computational facilities to help support $6,000,000 in funded research.
Eric Cochran, Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering says "As an experienced user of modern high performance computing facilities, I am thrilled to say that the HPC Partnership's new Opteron/InfiniBand HTX cluster computer is setting a new standard that other facilities will be hard-pressed to match! Because of the power of this machine I will be able to routinely conduct my research using complex 3-dimensional simulations whereas my competitors can only afford to work with 1- and 2-dimensional simulations. ISU's investment in this powerful computer will bring great rewards to my research!"
Rodney Fox, Professor and Herbert L. Stiles Chair of Chemical and Biological Engineering is using high performance computing to support over $1 million in external grants. Current funded research projects include full PDF simulations of the planar-jet reactor experiments in his laboratory; multiphase flow simulations of fluidized bed reactors used for nuclear reactor particle coating; CFD modeling of high-density polyethylene fluidized bed reactors; and multiscale simulations of aggregating nanoparticles. These three-dimensional, time-dependent flow simulations require significant computing resources such as those available at the ISU HPC facility.
John Hauptman, Professor of Physics said "I did a month of computations in a day and faxed the results to collaborators at CERN, Fermilab, and Russia."
Help
Support for the HPC Partnership equipment is provided by the High Performance Computing Group.
Joining
Faculty interested in joining the HPC Partnership should contact Glenn Luecke.
