High Performance Computing Center

HROTHGAR ---- TTU HPCC's NEWEST COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCE

Texas Tech University's High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) was established in 1999 to promote research and teaching on campus through integrating leading-edge high performance computing and visualization for the faculty, staff and students of Texas Tech University.

The HPCC provides consulting and assistance to campus researchers with experimental software and/or hardware needs. We also provide training in parallel and grid computing (as used at the facility) and administration for local high performance systems. HPCC serves as a liaison between various teams that are engaged in research. We work to support, configure and port applications to HPCC resources.

The High Performance Computing Center's (HPCC) hardware is located in two locations. The main production server, Hrothgar, its file servers and a couple of smaller systems are in the Experimental Sciences Building. The Weland and Antaeus clusters are located at Reese. Public nodes are available to any TTU researcher. Private nodes are owned by individual researchers and administered by HPCC. Antaeus private nodes are available for public non-priority use.

Campus

The Hrothgar cluster is a node based system. Hrothgar has 640 nodes for parallel jobs, 128 nodes for serial jobs and 46 private nodes. The parallel and private nodes are connected to a DDR Infiniband fabric. Each of the parallel nodes contains two Westmere 2.8 GHz 6-core processors with 24 GB memory. The serial nodes contain two Nehalem 3.0 GHz 4-core processors with 16 GB memory. The total number of parallel and serial cores are 7680 and 1024, respectively. The parallel nodes are a peak rating of 86 teraflops and a high performance LINPACK rating of 68 teraflops. The serial nodes are interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet.

Janus is a 22 node cluster running Windows HPC. Eighteen of its nodes are the same as the serial nodes on Hrothgar and use Gigabit Ethernet.

HPCC has a DataDirect Network storage system capable of providing storage for up to one petabyte of data. Using the cluster file system Lustre the storage provides a shared file system to most of the system run by the HPCC. The file system uses Infiniband to connect the parallel nodes on Hrothgar, while using Gigabit Ethernet to connect to the rest of the systems.

Reese

The Antaeus and Weland clusters at Reese support local and international grid computing. Antaeus has 24 public nodes and 40 private nodes. All nodes are the same as the serial nodes on Hrothgar. Weland is primarily a TechGrid resource with 16 nodes each with two Xeon E5540 processors for a total of 128 cores running at 2.53GHz.

Additionally, TTU participates in local, regional and national grid projects. A local resource is TechGrid which consists of more than 300 CPU's. For more information about services, equipment, or grid computing efforts at Texas Tech University, please email hpcc@ttu.edu or contact our office directly at (806) 742-4350.