At IU, what supercomputer systems are available for academic research?
At the heart of Indiana University's cyberinfrastructure are its robust and reliable systems and services provided by the Research Technologies division of UITS. These are the tools that enable computing research experimentation and implementation, and amplify the talents of local and national researchers. IU's cyberinfrastructure combines world-class supercomputing systems (Big Red II, Big Red, Quarry, Mason, and the Rockhopper POD) with proven professional training, consultation and support.
For an overview of IU's research computing facilities, see Research Technologies and IU's Advanced Scholarly & Artistic Cyberinfrastructure. Specific information about each system is provided below.
On this page:
Big Red II
Big Red II is Indiana University's main system for high-performance parallel computing. Big Red II is the first announced system capable of at least 1 petaflop that is owned by and operated solely for the benefit of a single university. There are other, larger systems to which a US university technically has legal title, such as Kraken at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Blue Waters at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Stampede at University of Texas at Austin, but those systems are funded under grants awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and are operated as assets for the national research community under agreements with the NSF.
For more, see Big Red II at Indiana University
Big Red
When commissioned in 2006, Big Red (bigred.teragrid.iu.edu) was one of the most powerful
university-owned computers in the US, and one of the 50 fastest
supercomputers in the world. Part of a comprehensive strategy to build
an advanced cyberinfrastructure to support research at Indiana
University, Big Red has a theoretical peak performance of more than 40
teraflops, and has achieved more than 28 teraflops on numerical
computations.
For more, see Big Red at Indiana University.
Quarry
Quarry (
quarry.uits.indiana.edu) is Indiana University's
primary Linux cluster computing environment for research and research
instruction use. It also serves as a "condominium cluster" environment
for researchers, research labs, departments, and schools that want to
have computational nodes housed within the IU Bloomington Data Center
and managed by UITS Research Technologies staff. Additionally, Quarry
provides a Virtual
Machine hosting environment for the Extreme Science and
Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the National Science
Foundation's largest advanced cyberinfrastructure facility.
Note: Following a system-wide upgrade in December 2012, Quarry now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6 (RHEL 6) and uses the Modules package (instead of SoftEnv) for manipulating user environments. For more, see Information about the 2012 upgrade to Quarry at IU. If you encounter any problems or have questions, email the High Performance Systems group.
For more, see Quarry at Indiana University.
Research Database Complex
The Indiana University Research Database Complex (
rdc.uits.iu.edu) supports research-related databases and
data-intensive applications that require databases. The RDC supports
Oracle and MySQL databases, and provides an environment
(rdcweb.uits.iu.edu) for database-driven web applications
focusing on research.
For more, see The Research Database Complex (RDC) at Indiana University.
Mason
Mason (
mason.indiana.edu) at Indiana University is a
large memory computer cluster configured to support data-intensive,
high-performance computing tasks for researchers using genome assembly
software (particularly software suitable for assembly of data from
next-generation sequencers), large-scale phylogenetic software, or
other genome analysis applications that require large amounts of
computer memory. At IU, Mason accounts are
available to IU faculty, postdoctoral fellows, research staff, and
students involved in genome research. IU educators providing
instruction on genome analysis software, and developers of such
software, are also welcome to use Mason. IU has also made Mason
available to genome researchers from the National Science Foundation's Extreme
Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project.
For more, see Mason at Indiana University.
Rockhopper
Rockhopper (
rockhopper.uits.iu.edu) is Penguin
Computing's Penguin-On-Demand (POD) supercomputing cloud appliance
hosted by Indiana University. The Rockhopper POD is a collaborative
effort between Penguin Computing, IU, the University of Virginia, the
University of California Berkeley, and the University of Michigan to
provide supercomputing cloud services in a secure US
facility. Researchers at US institutions of higher education and
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) can
purchase computing time from Penguin Computing, and receive access via
high-speed national research networks operated by IU.
For more, see Rockhopper at Indiana University.
Applying for accounts
To request an account on an Indiana University research system, use the Account Management Service (AMS); see At IU, if I already have some computing accounts, how do I get others? Account availability depends on your eligibility. For eligibility information, see the Research system accounts section in What computing accounts are available at IU?
Note: To prepare for the upcoming retirement of Big Red, no new Big Red accounts will be created after May 3, 2013. If you have a Big Red account as of May 3, you will still be able to access and use the system until your account is migrated to Big Red II. If you have questions or concerns contact the High Performance Systems group.
Rockhopper is a pay-for-usage system. For information about requesting an account, as well as the fee structure, see System access. For more about On Demand services, see Penguin Computing On Demand. For information about using Penguin On Demand clusters, see Penguin Computing's POD wiki.
Last modified on April 12, 2013.
