Henson High Performance Computing Lab
The Henson High Performance Computing Lab is a Beowulf cluster designed for both classroom instruction as well as a research cluster. During the day, it is used in the instruction of high performance computing, scientific computing, computer graphics, and general Linux instruction. In the off-hours, the cluster software is activated to research jobs to run either overnight or during the weekend. The Henson HPCL furthermore acts as the administrative unit for all Linux support and Linux resources for the Henson School.
The HPCL cluster is composed of 34 workstations, each with a 256GB scratch SSD, 32GB of RAM, and a shared /home directory. The cluster is divided into 30 general purpose workstations and 4 graphics workstations. All of these computers are capable of CUDA computation, however the general purpose workstations are outfitted with a CUDA capable workstation graphics card and a 12 core Intel Xeon E5-2650v4 CPU, whereas the graphics workstations are outfitted with a GTX 1050Ti graphics card and a 16 core AMD Threadripper 1950X CPU. The total computational capability of the cluster consists of 424 physical cores, a total scratch capacity of approximately 10TB and just over 1TB of RAM.
The HPCL cluster is primarily designed to run MPI-aware applications, however the cluster management software is capable of supporting applications with alternative considerations such as applications requiring license servers, alternative network configurations, or batch processing applications. Additionally, there is experimental Hadoop support using the Magpie framework for deployment of Hadoop via the cluster management software.