At IU, what supercomputer systems are available for academic research?

The High Performance Systems (HPS) group at Indiana University, part of the Research Technologies division of UITS, manages and administers Big Red, Quarry, and Libra, supercomputer-class computing systems dedicated to research. These systems and associated support services enable IU researchers to solve large and complex scientific problems and handle massive datasets. For an overview of IU's research computing facilities, see Indiana University's Cyberinfrastructure: The least you need to know (a PDF file). Specific information about each system is provided below.

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Big Red

Big Red, one of the most powerful university-owned computers in the US and one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, is a distributed shared-memory cluster with a theoretical peak performance of over 20 teraflops. Big Red has 8GB of memory and a PCI-X Myrinet 2000 adapter for high-bandwidth, low-latency MPI applications. In addition to local scratch disks, the Big Red compute nodes are connected via gigabit Ethernet to a 200TB GPFS file system. The Big Red cluster runs the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Batch jobs are managed with IBM's LoadLeveler and the Moab Workload Manager.

Access to Big Red is provided to all Indiana University faculty, graduate students, and staff. Undergraduates must have an IU faculty or staff sponsor. Instructional use is limited to courses that have been approved by the Director for Research Technologies.

For detailed information, see the HPS Big Red Cluster page.

Libra

The Libra system at Indiana University is a cluster of three IBM BladeCenters and seven IBM p575s all running AIX 5.3. The Power chips in the p575s and the Blades can attain up to four floating point operations per cycle, providing extremely high throughput for scientific workloads.

Serial applications and two-CPU SMP applications requiring less than 4GB of memory run on the Blade nodes, libra01-libra42. The p575 nodes libra43, libra47, libra48, libra49, and libra50 are dedicated to large-memory serial applications and to shared-memory multiprocessor (SMP) applications requiring up to eight CPUs. The p575 nodes libra45 and libra46 are dedicated to research databases (the Research Database Complex, RDC).

All IU graduate students, faculty, and staff can access Libra. Undergraduates must have an IU faculty or staff sponsor. Instructional use is limited to courses that have been approved by the Director for Research Technologies.

Libra became available in August 2005, and continues a tradition of providing central IBM AIX systems for IU research computing needs since 1992.

For detailed information, see the HPS Libra Cluster page.

Quarry

Quarry, Indiana University's newest supercomputer, provides a general-purpose Unix computing environment for academic and instructional use. Quarry runs Red Hat Linux, with TORQUE and Moab for job management, and SoftEnv to simplify the application environment. Quarry is a seven-teraflop system built from Intel processors; it replaces the two-teraflop AVIDD system. Quarry consists of 112 IBM HS21 Blade servers, each containing two Intel Xeon 5335 quad-core processors. Quarry has 8GB of memory, a 36GB locally attached SAS disk for local scratch space, and gigabit Ethernet for system interconnects.

Quarry serves multiple communities as a research cluster and as a general purpose Linux environment. Accounts are open to all IU students, faculty, and staff, as well as affiliated researchers.

For detailed information, see the HPS Quarry Cluster page.

Research Database Complex

The Research Database Complex (RDC), part of the Libra cluster, is dedicated to research-related databases and data-intensive applications that require a database. Currently, only Oracle databases are supported and the default database size is 15MB. The RDC also provides an environment for database-driven web applications with a research focus. This system is known as rdcweb.uits.iu.edu and runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. User home directories reside on the IBM N5500 NAS storage device, with disk quotas of 10GB per user. This quota is shared by your Big Red and Quarry accounts, if you have accounts on those systems.

For detailed information, see the HPS RDC page.

Applying for an account

To obtain an account on Big Red, Libra, or Quarry, visit the Account Management Service at:

https://itaccounts.iu.edu/

After you log in (using your Network ID), click create more accounts. Follow the instructions to create your Big Red, Libra, and/or Quarry accounts.

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Last modified on August 01, 2008.

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