Tools & Toys

Theoreticians do not usually have lasers or other fancy lab equipment to play with, but we still have a few tools and toys we enjoy. First and foremost: computers. Big computers…

Our primary computing resource is currently the “rush” general compute cluster of the Center for Computing in Research (CCR) at UB. “Rush” is a supercomputer with currently (05/2014) 8000 cores and QDR Infiniband interconnect. A subset (32) of the cluster nodes contain (64) NVidia Tesla M2050 “Fermi” GPUs. CCR also maintains several high-performance storage systems including Isilon-based storage (320TB) as well as a parallel storage system from Panasas (215TB). The Center’s clusters contain high-performance low-latency Infiniband networks, and they are interconnected via a 10 gigabit Ethernet (10gigE) core network from Arista. CCR has a peak performance capacity of more than 100 Tflops, 600 TB of high-performance storage, and it is housed in a state-of-the-art 4000 sq ft machine room. For more details, check out the CCR webpage.

In addition to “rush” the group will obtain its own research cluster later this year.

A big “Thank you!” goes to our friends over at CCR (in particular Dr. Tom Furlani, Dr. Matt Jones, Cynthia Cornelius, and Steve Gallo), who are doing a truly amazing job hosting and administering a first-class academic high-performance computing facility. We could not do our work without them.

---

We are also very grateful for support by the UB Science & Engineering Node Services (SENS). SENS provides computer and technical support as well as assistance for most of the science and engineering disciplines of UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). SENS maintains a diverse set of facilities and provides a variety of services. For instance, they host this webpage as well as our Redmine project management server. A particular thanks goes to Dave Yearke for all his help and patience.