CNSI Shared Computing Facility
This HPC cluster is shared between particpants who buy nodes for the cluster. CNSI has provided all of the infrastructure (e.g. networking, head node, RAID, Myrinet switch, etc.) for the cluster, the researcher need only buy the nodes themselves, thus saving perhaps $10,000 that can instead be spent on another 4 compute nodes. Additionally, CNSI provides the space in our machine room, and also provides the management of the cluster.
The only other users on the clusters are researchers who have bought in, and CNSI also buys some compute nodes, so in the past people even get more compute resources than they bought!
This model is also especially useful if you have chunks of money in smaller portions, e.g. $5k or $10k - now you can buy several nodes in a large cluster than having a collection of servers that accumulate over the years in your lab or office space.
The current 'default' compute node is an 8 core HP DL165 Opteron system with 16Gb of RAM and Myrinet 2000 interconnect. If your work requires large RAM, or faster CPU, we can accomodate that, but most people find the default configuration to be a good setup for the nanotechnology and materials science research that is done in CNSI. This type of node currently (as of early 2009) costs about $3,000.
The cluster has grown to 42 nodes (so 224 cores) in use by four groups.
Please contact Paul Weakliem for specific information.