On July 1, 2003, NC State University began its High Performance Computing (HPC) operations, which provide NCSU students and faculty with entry- and medium-level high-performance research and education computing facilities and consulting support.

The configuration consists of a 32 processor (max 166 GFlop) IBM p690 and a 128 processor (max 1.4 TFlop) IBM Blade Center. The p690 is supported by 3.5 TB of direct attached disk space. The Blade Center is supported by 2.5 TB of blade-distributed on-board disk space and 10+ TB of shared network attached disk space.

In addition, NCSU Information Technology Division (ITD) started a HPC Partnership Program (pdf). Researchers purchase HPC hardware and any specialized or discipline-specific software licenses. NCSU Information Technology Division (ITD) provides space in an appropriate and secure operating environment and the system administration and server support. In return for services provided by ITD, when computing resources are not being used by the faculty partner, the server(s) are available to the general NCSU HPC cluster user community.

NEW!

In addition to the IBM 690 and Blade Center, the Sonoma Origin 2400 is up and running at UNC-CH and is available for use by NCSU users. Ruth Marinshaw (ruth@email.unc.edu) is the contact person at UNC-CH for questions about Sonoma (see also http://help.unc.edu/?search=sonoma&Submit=s+e+a+r+c+h+ ). Sonoma is currently configured with 32 CPUs, 1 GB per CPU. There is 1 TB of scratch space; a second TB of scratch space is being installed. User space is allocated to 100MB per user as a starting point.

For more information on high-performance computing for NCSU users and the software, technologies, and support available, see the following links.

NCSU:

http://hpc.ncsu.edu/

UNCCH:

http://help.unc.edu/?search=sonoma&Submit=s+e+a+r+c+h+

Can also be found by searching on “Sonoma” at help.unc.edu

MCNC:

http://www.mcnc.org/gridservices/

North Carolina and Grid Computing:

http://www.ncsu.edu/itd/hpc/Grid/Grid.php