The Center for Numerical Supercomputing

offers to the University of Puerto Rico research and education community, high-end computational resources in a multi-faceted environment. Access to this environment is authorized through an allocation process based on demonstratable needs for documented research or educational activities.

Research accounts are available for researchers and graduate students alike, associated with any of the 11 institutions of the UPR system. Class accounts are available for hands-on practicals and term projects in parallel computing and advanced computational science. At this time, the Center is distributed in two locations within the UPR system.

the main HPCf location presently houses the following components:

SGI Origin 2400 system with the following characteristics

• 24 MIPS processors
• 19 Gigabytes of memory
• 432 Gigabytes of FiberChannel storage in a dual-rack framework.

This computer also presents two InfiniteReality2 graphics systems, which will be discussed in the Visualization Laboratory section.

This machine's name is boreas.hpcf.upr.edu. To access this machine, one must first fill out an allocation request form, found in the "User Info" section of our website.

Twenty four (24) processor Linux virtual cluster running over the Condor distributed processing environment.

two (2) Consensys OpenNAS storage devices. Each device is configured to store 2.1 Terabytes in a RAID level 5 configuration.

Nightly backups are realized using a StorageTek TimberWolf 9730 tape robot allowing us a total of 1.02 Terabyte of uncompressed data storage on DLT tapes. The backups are managed through the OpenSource software project, Amanda.

Access to the computational resources of the SGI Origin servers is through the PBS/Maui queuing and scheduling systems. Furthermore,substantial security measures have been implemented to guarantee integrity of the data and machines. All our servers run the usual complement of compilers, debuggers, profilers and scientific libraries normally found in the Varsity package of SGI.

The HPCf is supporting certain basic scientific software packages such as VMD, gcg, DLPOLY, etc. More information about the software contents of each machine can be found here.

The initial funds for the HPCf supercomputer were obtained from the Resource Center for Science and Engineering, which allowed for the purchase of the first Origin rack in a minimal configuration. Upgrades to the machine were subsequently achieved using an infrastructure grant obtained from NSF-EPSCoR.

The Center is seen as an ideal platform for

• code development and optimization
• problem parameterization
• preliminary results generation before migration to national supercomputing centers such as NCSA or NPACI .