Three High Performance Computing Upgrades Completed

Library and Technology Services (LTS) has purchased a 32-core shared memory processor computer bringing an amazing amount of new computational power to campus. The new compute server, called Altair, consists of eight (8) quad-core Intel Xeon 64-bit processors with 128 Gigabytes (GB) of RAM.

Altair replaces the previous centralized shared memory compute resource, Vega. Researchers on campus who need large amounts of computational power combined with greater than four (4) GB’s of RAM for their compute problems, can take advantage of this 64-bit processing architecture to run programs like Matlab, Ansys, Fluent, and Abaqus.

In addition to this new compute server, LTS has put into operation an 18-node Linux login farm called LEAF. Anyone can access these 32-bit machines that have four (4) Xeon single-core processors with 12 GB of RAM on each one of these Egenera Blade Server nodes.

The head node of this farm uses load balancing to provide the best resources for your needs by directing your login session to the machine with the least amount of processing load. No special account permission is required. The same applications that users can run on Altair are also available on any of the LEAF servers.

For more details on Altair and Leaf hardware architectures, please visit:
http://www.lehigh.edu/computing/hpc/services/hardware.html.

And finally this summer, LTS refreshed 20 new Linux workstations that are distributed in public spaces in the Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Earth and Environmental Sciences department buildings. Each one of these Dell Precision T7400 workstations has a minimum of a single Xeon 64-bit processor with 4 GB of RAM, 80GB hard disk, and a 256MB graphics card with a 22-inch monitor.

Some of the important software that these computers will support includes Spartan, a quantum chemistry application suite, and ARC GIS, which is for creating and analyzing geographic information systems databases.

For more information on how to take advantage of Lehigh’s HPC resources, please visit http://www.lehigh.edu/computing/hpc/ .

-- Brandon Leeds
   Senior Computer Consultant, LTS
   High Performance Computing

Article posted September 12, 2008

 

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