Overview

Iowa State University provides faculty, staff and students with high performance computing (HPC) facilities and technology for research purposes. High performance computing utilizes supercomputers and parallel processing for running advanced programs quickly and efficiently.

HPC Group in Information Technology Services

The High Performance Computing (HPC) group in Information Technology Services includes full-time staff, graduate students, postdoctoral students and visiting scholars. The group provides training, assistance, and support for research and high performance computing as well as engaging in funded research projects.

All students, faculty and staff have access to ITS HPC staff for help with HPC projects and research on their own machines. Specific areas of HPC staff expertise include:

• Training and assisting researchers and students to use HPC for research.
• Training and assisting students and instructors that use HPC facilities for class work.
• Selecting and developing efficient algorithms for scientific computing.
• Supporting faculty and student development of parallel programs using OpenMP, MPI, SHMEM, Co-Array Fortran and Unified Parallel C.
• Assisting faculty and students in program optimization, parallelization, debugging and porting.
• Providing hardware and software support for the HPC facilities.

Student HPC Cluster

The student HPC cluster supports instructional computing and unsponsored thesis development. Providing students access to high capacity, high performance computing facilities (systems with capabilities far beyond that of desktop systems) is critical to offering quality undergraduate and graduate education at ISU. Instructors and students are encouraged to use these facilities for their classes or their high performance computing needs, and for pursuing their own personal educational interests. However, these computing facilities are not for email, web browsing, game playing, or to support funded research.

Access to the student cluster will be given to all students who agree that they will use the machine for educational purposes or for non-funded research. Instructors can obtain access to the machine for themselves and all their students by filling out an online form, available on the HPC public site. Students who do not have access through a class can obtain access by filling out a separate form, also available on the HPC public site.

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 enable and maintain state-of-the-art, world-leading funded research.

Joining the HPC Partnership has several benefits:

• HPC Group support - all machines are maintained by the HPC group.
• Partners get access to a machine that is much larger than a machine purchased by themselves or by their department.

Membership requires a fee. Faculty interested in joining the HPC Partnership should contact Professor Glenn Luecke, grl@iastate.edu or 515-294-6659.