Facilities
Introduction
Our research focus is on some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe, where the strongest gravitational and magnetic fields interact with ultra-relativistic matter and high-energy radiation, that can only be studied through advanced, large-scale computation and visualization.
Therefore, computer clusters are a key element to the success of our research programs. The clusters are also used as testbed for developing novel computational techniques and software, which also form part of the research mission of the CCRG.
All three clusters are designed for high-speed, large memory, and fast interconnect, and are optimized for the maximum performance of our simulation software.
All clusters and storage system were produced by Aeon Computing, and are cooled using a an in-rack green cooling solution provided by a local company, OptiCool Technologies.
Storage The central research computing facilities at RIT makes available a new Cold Storage system with a total of 2 PB available for our use. Each node consists of 2x Intel Scalable 4108 (16 cores) processors, 96GB Memory, 12x 12TB HDDs (144TB RAW), 2x 500GB NVMe storage 25Gb Network Interface. The total raw storage is 3.4PB, and around 2 PB usable with erasure coding.
In addition to local cluster facilities, scientists at the center also use national supercomputing resources such as the: NSF-funded petascale Blue Waters systems at the Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), available through allocations grants (ACI-0832606, ACI-1516125, PHY-0722703), NSF-funded XSEDE resources, and has recently been awarded allocation in the NSF-funded Petascale computing system, Frontera, was awarded for deployment at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
More information about our allocation awards see the following pages: RIT's NCSA's Blue Waters Allocation, TACC's early science allocation, also the NSF's Cyberinfrastructure and Major Facilities Presentation for an overview on these large allocations and systems.