High Performance & Computational Resources

NYU supports high performance computing and networking for researchers and scholars, and is home to several high performance clusters and high-speed networks equipped with a wide variety of research software packages. If you or a member of your research group has high performance computing or networking needs—including visualization, simulations, or other data intensive operations, send email to hpc@nyu.edu to request a consultation. Use of ITS high performance computing resources is open to all faculty and to sponsored graduate students. ITS is also available to partner with NYU faculty as they seek funding for research with substantial technology components.

• The NYU General Cluster
• The Sun Cluster: Cardiac
• The SGI Cluster: GAUSS
• Additional Resources

The NYU General Cluster

The new NYU General Cluster is a general-purpose high performance computing resource for the NYU research community that offers 2.656 terabytes of memory, large-scale storage options, and a theoretical peak performance of more than 10.5 Teraflops (a trillion calculations per second). The Rocks operating system is used to manage the cluster, which consists of 140 compute nodes and two interactive login nodes, with a total CPU core count of 1,120. Each compute node contains two Xeon Intel Quad-Core 64-bit processors, running at 2.33GHz. The cluster accommodates low latency parallel runs via nodes that are connected with an Infiniband DDR network from CISCO. The General Cluster offers GNU, Intel C, and Fortran compilers, and the Matlab, R, and Mathematica applications (additional software may be installed upon request). Home directories are mounted from the control node of the cluster, and there is also a scratch filesystem accessible from all nodes. For clients with large data needs, there is now a data filesystem attached to the clusters' login nodes.

The Sun Cluster: Cardiac

Cardiac is a three-rack system built around a Sun Microsystems, Inc. 8000p Blade Center solution, with 80 Sun Microsystem X8440 Blade Servers interconnected by Voltaire, Inc.’s low-latency Infiniband switching technology. With a total of 1,280 computational cores, each of the Sun Blade servers employs four CPU sockets populated with Barcelona 8356 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Inc. These quad-core processors run at 2.3 GHz clock speed and offer four floating points per cycle. The acquisition of Cardiac was made possible by a generous grant from St. Jude Medical to Dr. Larry Chinitz, head of Cardiac Electrophysiology, and Dr. Glenn I. Fishman, Director of the Division of Cardiology at the NYU Langone Medical Center. (For details please see www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/fall08/cardiac.html.)

The SGI Cluster: GAUSS

GAUSS is a 64 CPU, 128Gb Altix 4700 server which runs SuSE Linux® and is based on Intel® Itanium® 2 dual core processors. The design of the server utilizes SGI® NUMAflex® architecture, which permits computations, memory, and I/O scaling within a single shared memory environment. This low-latency cluster provides exceptional performance.

For More Information

For additional details on using any of these clusters, please take a look at the HPC Wiki.

Additional Resources

Following are links to a selection of high performance computing and related resources and facilities, most of which reside outside of NYU.

• NYU HPC Resources for Students
  High performance computing and visualization workstations running Windows and Linux are available for student use at the Washington Place Technology Center. Call 1-212-998-3058 or 1-212-998-3159 for more information.
• TeraGrid
  An open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at nine partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource.
• Open Science Grid
  A national, distributed computing grid for data-intensive research.
• The National Science Foundation
  An independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "o promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  The Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory.
• Argonne National Laboratory
  One of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers. It is also the nation's first national laboratory, chartered in 1946.
• TOP500 Supercomputer Sites
  A project started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing.

Page last reviewed: August 24, 2009