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In the winter of 1998-1999, a group of WSU faculty decided to acquire high performance computing facilities in order to raise the level of research on campus. Funding was obtained from NSF and WSU, and an Origin 2000 with 16 processors was ordered from SGI and installed in April 1999. In March, 2001, another 8 processors were added. In the spring of 2003, two grants were obtained to finance an entirely new set of resources, an SGI Altix 3700 with 32 1.3GHz Intel Itanium2 (64 bit) processors with 32 GB RAM and 36GB scratch disk and a pair of clusters from Atipa Technologies, each with 17 dual 2.666 MHz Xeon (32 bit) processor nodes (2 GB RAM with 77GB scratch disk each) along with 1TB of file storage accessible to all nodes via NFS. All nodes are running RedHat Linux* In the spring of 2005, another grant was obtained to finance a Dell cluster for computational fluid dynamics
for Aerospace Engineering. HiPeCC agreed to administer the cluster in exchange
for letting other users use it when AE does not need it. It contains a
head node and 45 dual 3.6 MHz Xeon (EM64T) processor nodes, each with 4GB
RAM and 67GB scratch disk, all running RedHat Linux. 900GB of disk were
added to the file server. In the summer of 2006, another Aerospace Engineering professor required
processors for computational fluid dynamics and another 30 nodes were added
to the existing Dell cluster. 1200GB of disk were also added to the file
server. HiPeCC is run by a full time System Administrator/Trainer and managed by a Director. Policies and direction are set by a user's committee representing seven departments across campus. HiPeCC does not report to any academic department but rather it is under University Computing and Telecommunications Services. HiPeCC resources are available to all faculty and staff on campus. HiPeCC is not limited to resident machines. We will assist users in accessing more powerful machines at regional supercomputer centers. Nor is HiPeCC limited to supercomputers. We will promote other computing resources such as Internet2 in order to raise the level of research at WSU. Come to us when you have a problem too
big to solve on your computer.
*We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. EIA-0216178 and Grant No. EPS-0236913, matching support from the State of Kansas |