At IU, what supercomputer systems are available for academic research?

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The High Performance Systems (HPS) group at Indiana University, part of the Research Technologies division of UITS, manages and administers Big Red and Quarry, supercomputer-class computing systems dedicated to research. These systems and associated support services enable IU researchers to solve large and complex scientific problems and handle massive datasets. For an overview of IU's research computing facilities, see Indiana University's Cyberinfrastructure: The least you need to know (a PDF file). Specific information about each system is provided below.

On this page:

Big Red

Big Red, one of the most powerful university-owned computers in the US and one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, is a distributed shared-memory cluster with a theoretical peak performance of over 20 teraflops. Big Red has 8GB of memory and a PCI-X Myrinet 2000 adapter for high-bandwidth, low-latency MPI applications. In addition to local scratch disks, the Big Red compute nodes are connected via gigabit Ethernet to a 200TB GPFS file system. The Big Red cluster runs the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Batch jobs are managed with IBM's LoadLeveler and the Moab Workload Manager.

Access to Big Red is provided to all Indiana University faculty and graduate students, and faculty-sponsored undergraduates and staff. Instructional use is limited to courses that have been approved by the Director for Research Technologies.

For detailed information, see the HPS Big Red Cluster page.

Quarry

Quarry, Indiana University's newest supercomputer, provides a general-purpose Unix computing environment for academic and instructional use. Quarry runs Red Hat Linux, with TORQUE (also called PBS) and Moab for job management, and SoftEnv to simplify the application environment. Quarry is a seven-teraflop system built from Intel processors; it consists of 112 IBM HS21 Blade servers, each containing two Intel Xeon 5335 quad-core processors. Quarry has 8GB of memory, a 36GB locally attached SAS disk for local scratch space, and gigabit Ethernet for system interconnects.

Quarry serves multiple communities as a research cluster and as a general purpose Linux environment. Accounts are open to all IU students, faculty, and staff, as well as affiliated researchers.

For detailed information, see the HPS Quarry Cluster page.

Research Database Complex

The Research Database Complex (RDC) is dedicated to research-related databases and data-intensive applications that require a database. Oracle and MySQL databases are supported, and the default database size is 15MB. The RDC also provides an environment for database-driven web applications with a research focus. This system, rdcweb.uits.iu.edu, runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. User home directories reside on the IBM N5500 NAS storage device, with disk quotas of 10GB per user. This quota is shared by your Big Red and Quarry accounts, if you have accounts on those systems.

For detailed information, see the HPS RDC page.

Applying for an account

To obtain an account on Big Red or Quarry, visit the Account Management Service at:

https://itaccounts.iu.edu/

After you log in (using your Network ID), click create more accounts. Follow the instructions to create your Big Red and/or Quarry accounts.

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Last modified on August 03, 2009.