Significant Extension of HPCF CPU Cluster taki

Thu, 06 May 2021 14:09:13 -0400
hpc, hpcf, website

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

We are happy to share the news that HPCF is able to extend the CPU cluster in taki by 17 new nodes. DoIT has placed the purchase order last week.

We have to thank 10 faculty from 9 departments and research centers in all 3 colleges at UMBC for their community spirit and ability to help us all with this extension, namely:

CNMS:

Joe Bennett (Chemistry) 3 nodes,

Pengwang Zhai (Physics) 4 nodes,

Larrabee Strow (Physics) 1 node,

Matthias Gobbert (Mathematics and Statistics) 2 nodes

including one funded by Jerimy Polf (UMB School of Medicine),

COEIT:

Tyler Josephson (CBEE) 3 nodes,

Curtis Menyuk (CSEE) 1 node,

Chuck Eggleton (Mechanical Engineering) 1 node,

CAHSS:

Matt Baker (GES) 1 node,

Lee Boot (IRC and IS) 1 node.

To put this in perspective, this extends the current 44 CPU nodes from 2018 with two 18-core CPUs each by a significant percentage of 17 nodes from 2021 with two 24-core CPUs each. The 2018 nodes will continue to be valuable for large-memory jobs, since each node has 384 GB of memory, while the 2021 nodes will have 192 GB only, so they represent a different optimization of core count vs. memory size. The purchase made sense now, since the CPUs still share key architectural features with the 2018 nodes and thus enable simpler system administration.

As always, we take this opportunity to thank the Unix group, particularly Roy Prouty, Randy Phillip, and Tim Champ for their support and cooperation on our community-based High Performance Computing Facility. We all could not do it without them, and in turn we as faculty had a good chance here to contribute with the financing of this purchase.

The thumbnail photo with this post shows me (Gobbert) with our excellent HPCF RAs Carlos Barajas and Reetam Majumder in front of the 2018 equipment that we are extending with this purchase.

And as always, please remember to send us information on all publications that use HPCF, also on students' theses when they graduate! The list of publications is our most important documentation of outcomes.

Matthias Gobbert, Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee and PI of the MRI grants to HPCF)

and

Damian Doyle, Associate Vice President, Division of Information Technology