Our computing facilities are housed within a central computing cluster (https://walnut.pics.upenn.edu). This is a shared facility that is used by faculty research groups from School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) as well as the Penn Institute for Computational Science (PICS). The equipment is placed in a shared secure University data center with redundant power, alongside cooling systems engineered to handle the cluster’s high density heat load, and is professionally managed by CETS (the IT Support staff for SEAS).
The cluster consists of 62 computational nodes, each containing four Intel E5-4620 8-core 2.2GHz processors and 64GB RAM (for a total of 1,984 computational “cores” with 3,968GB of distributed RAM), connected by an industry-standard high speed low latency network interconnect (Infiniband) for job communication as well as Gigabit Ethernet for storage and management traffic, housed within standard server racks and managed by a head node running Torque/MOAB work flow management software to maximize resource utilization. Computational efficiency is optimized through the use of Intel Cluster-specific compilers and libraries.
Our research group has priority access on 18.6% of the cluster, corresponding to 370 cores, and unrestricted access to the remainder of the 1614 cores, whenever available.
Supporting equipment includes several iMac desktop computers with software for data processing and visualization.
Office Facilities
These facilities are located in Rooms 372 and 316 of the Towne Building, University of Pennsylvania.