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Welcome |
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Welcome to the Supercomputing Clusters of the Physics Department at the University of Richmond!
The Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics group and the Cosmology group recently acquired a new cluster with
support from and NSF MRI grant.
The system consists of 20, dual-6-core, remote nodes.
Information on the system and the software is here
and here.
The Physics Department at University of Richmond also
operates a 53-node research cluster (nodes
are mostly dual 1.4 GHz Athlon class). The system runs
Linux and uses the Beowulf system for managing batch jobs.
The Research cluster is funded by the National Science Foundation and
the University of Richmond. There is one internal user and several outside
users.
The Research cluster (SpiderWulf). There are currently 53 nodes.
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The cluster project at Richmond began in the spring of
1999. Professors Mike Vineyard and Jerry Gilfoyle realized the need for
a quantum leap in computing power to support their research
in nuclear physics at the
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab).
Using funds from their Department of Energy (DOE) research grant and
other monies from the University, they put together a prototype
computing cluster in the summer of 1999.
That prototype is shown below.
It is no longer operational.
The current Research cluster was assembled by LinuxLabs in
the winter of 2001-2002 and arrived in February 2002.
After a long commissioning phase, the cluster became fully operational
in fall, 2002.
The funds for the project came from
a successful grant application by Dr. Gilfoyle and Dr. Vineyard
to the Major Research Instrumentation
Program of the National Science Foundation for $175,000.
The current configuration consists of 49, 512-MByte-RAM, 1.4 GHz Athlon remote nodes and
one head.
Each node has a single 18-GByte disk.
It is supported by 3 TBytes of space in three RAID disks and communicating
by another 1.4 GHz Athlon fileserver.
Prototype Research cluster consisting of 12 nodes.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0116349.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are
those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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