Research Support

Mills end of life: Cluster planning

The Mills High-Performance Computing (HPC) community cluster has entered its fifth and final year of service. The Mills cluster research community has been notified that the final year has begun and that arrangements need to be made for new computing resources starting in 2017. Mills cluster research groups will need to find permanent storage for data that needs to be retained beyond early 2017.

IT-NSS is unable to secure hardware support for Mills' final year. Minor changes will be made to the cluster's scheduling software that are expected to keep the cluster functional through the end of the 2016 calendar year. NSS will begin to dismantle the Mills cluster in 2017.

The IT-Research Computing group is starting the process of designing the next UD community cluster. The process involves reviewing the effectiveness of the current cluster designs, considering researcher needs, and considering newer available technologies. Anyone wishing to become a stakeholder in the next UD community cluster should contact Anita Schwartz. More information can be found on the Research Computing site.

HPC Symposium Series

In January 2016, IT-Research Computing hosted an HPC Symposium with Arthi Jayaraman, associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and her research group. The presentation covered how they use UD's HPC clusters to design polymers that are used in materials like solar cells, tires, and therapeutic DNA delivery. Specifically, they discussed how they employ GPU computing to handle the molecular dynamics simulations and how they implement OpenMP and OpenMPI on the cluster to maximize efficiency when using the clusters.

Upcoming presenters include Dana Veron on February 24 and the Neunuebel Neuroscience Lab on June 22. Registration for these presentations is available at the Research Computing website.