Center for Computational Science

Photo of the atrium of the Science Center

The department is located in the newly remodeled Science Center. The $20 million project provides students with well-equipped laboratories, technologically advanced classrooms, and dedicated research space.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy is home to a 16 processor Intel Itanium (IA64) cluster, which serves as a resource for teaching and research in all disciplines with an interest in computational science. The system was acquired via a grant from the Ohio Supercomputer Center, as part of its Cluster Ohio program. This OSC initiative seeks to develop distributed computing resources in support of teaching and research throughout the state.

The system was installed in June 2003, and is a distributed-shared-memory parallel computer. It has eight nodes, each containing a pair of 733 MHz Intel Itanium (IA64) processors and 4Gb of main memory. Total system memory is 32Gb. Each node also contains a 17Gb SCSI hard drive for use as temporary storage. Inter-node communication (for message passing) is handled via Myrinet.

The software environment is Linux, with Intel C, C++ and Fortran compilers, the Etnus Totalview debugger, and various libraries and other tools. The MPI and OpenMP parallel programming standards are supported, and batch requests are handled by PBS with the Maui scheduler.

Peak performace is more than 45 billion floating-point calculations per second (45 GFLOPs).