Facilities

High-Performance Computing Facilities

The Center for Scientific Computation provides the main resource for scientific computing collaboration at Southern Methodist University. Members of the CSC have access to the large-scale SMU computing cluster. This cluster currently has:

  • 163 batch worker nodes, connected with a gigabit ethernet network:
    • 107 are 8-core nodes (856 total cores), each with 48 GB of memory and 250 GB of local disk space.
    • 56 are 12-core nodes (672 total cores), each with 72 GB of memory and 500 GB of local disk space.
  • 48 parallel nodes, connected with an Infiniband high-speed network for MPI-based parallel computing:
    • 16 are 8-core nodes (128 total cores), each with 48 GB of memory and 500 GB of local disk space.
    • 32 are 12-core nodes (384 total cores), each with 72 GB of memory and 500 GB of local disk space.
  • 2 high-memory data analysis and shared-memory parallel nodes, each with 8 cores, 144 GB of RAM, and 3 TB of local disk space.
  • 1 GPU computing node, with 8 CPU cores, 6 GB of RAM and 2 NVIDIA GTX 295 cards.  Each of these GPU cards has 960 GPU cores and 3585 MB of RAM.
  • One 320 TB parallel Lustre file system is attached to all nodes.
  • OS: Scientific Linux 5.5 (64 bit).
  • Scheduler: Condor
  • The software stack for the full cluster includes a variety of high performance mathematics and software libraries, as well as the GNU, NAG and PGI compiler suites.
  • The two high-memory nodes also have Matlab installed, for interactive data analysis.

For information on obtaining a user account on the SMU computing cluster, see this page (SMU internal).

Faculty are encouraged to contribute to the cluster via the CSC's Faculty Partnership Program.