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 and Quarry, 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 (PDF). 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 8 GB 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 to the Data
Capacitor, with scratch space available at
N/dc/scratch/username). 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 and graduate students, and faculty-sponsored undergraduates and staff. Instructional use is limited to courses that have been approved by the Director for Research Technologies.
For detailed information, see The Big Red Cluster.
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 (also called PBS) and Moab for job management, and SoftEnv to simplify the application environment. Quarry is a seven-teraflop system built from Intel processors; it consists of 112 IBM HS21 Blade servers, each containing two Intel Xeon 5335 quad-core processors. Quarry has 8 GB of memory, a 36 GB 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 Quarry Cluster.
Research Database Complex
The Research Database Complex (RDC) is dedicated to research-related databases and data-intensive applications that require a database. Oracle and MySQL 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,rdcweb.uits.iu.edu, runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. User
home directories reside on the IBM N5500 NAS storage device, with disk
storage of 10GB per user. This space is shared by your Big Red and
Quarry accounts, if you have accounts on those systems.
For detailed information, see Research Database Complex (RDC).
Applying for accounts
IU students, faculty, and staff can request accounts on Big Red and Quarry via the Account Management Service (AMS). See At IU, if I already have some computing accounts, how do I get others?
Last modified on November 23, 2011.
