Purdue University

The specifications of Purdue’s newest community cluster research supercomputer will be the focus of an informational luncheon for faculty, staff and graduate students, set for noon to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 29, in the Lawson Computer Science Building, Room 1142.

ITaP Research Computing staff members will provide an overview of the new cluster, which is scheduled to be built in 2017, and answer questions about it. Food and drink will be provided. Register here.

The new cluster will be the ninth built since 2008 through the Community Cluster Program. There are now more than 190 faculty partners from all of Purdue’s primary colleges and schools using the community clusters and other services operated by ITaP for research, spanning more than 35 science, engineering, life sciences and social science disciplines.

ITaP Research Computing installs, administers and maintains the community clusters, including security, software installation and user support, so researchers can concentrate on doing research rather than on operating a high-performance computing system.

Centralized, large group purchasing allows Purdue to negotiate better prices with vendors and to buy more computing capacity than individuals or campus units could otherwise afford. Community clustering also maximizes use by sharing computing power among the faculty partners whenever it is idle. Researchers always have ready access to the cluster capacity they purchase, but they also can share capacity fellow researchers aren’t using at the moment. This offers users access to substantially more computational power if needed and keeps the machines busy.

Additionally, the community clusters provide high-end computational resources with unrivaled access to research data services including the Research Data Depot and the Fortress HPSS Archive.

To learn more about the Community Cluster Program, contact Preston Smith, ITaP’s director of research services and support, psmith@purdue.edu or 49-49729.