A Distributed, High Performance Computing System for the Applied Sciences

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

The Principal Investigators will acquire dedicated instrumentation for computational research in structural biology, material science, and environmental/marine sciences. The investigators also lead the undergraduate & graduate computational science curricula at UNC-Chapel Hill, which will benefit from the proposed instrumentation. The proposed equipment includes clusters of linux workstations, two 16-processor beowulf-class machines for parallel programming development and education, and a next generation mid-sized shared memory machine|a 48 processor SGI Origin 3000. These three components will be integrated using campus optical fiber, and shared file and processing systems, with consistent configuration and portability across the six departments (Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Marine Science, Mathematics, Statistics) and the Institute for Marine Sciences (IMS). High-end production work will continue to be accomplished at the nearby North Carolina Supercomputing Center, which include a tera op IBM SP system with 180 nodes and 720 processors. The proposed instrumentation, along with the NCSC facility, will yield a high-performance computational environment for the interdisciplinary computational science research and education program at UNC-CH.