FACILITIES, COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The SCS plays a major role in the support of FSU's cyber infrastructure by providing facilities and technical expertise in the support of scientific computing.  The SCS manages two leading edge computing facilities for FSU; the SCS computing facility (located on the main FSU campus in Dirac Science Library) and the FSU shared-HPC facility (located at Innovation Park in the Sliger Building).  Both facilities foster nationally recognized research programs, which span multiple disciplines and are maintained by a combination of university and external funding.  The SCS facility provides a highly flexible computing environment designed to support specialized and experimental hardware and software systems; while the shared-HPC supports a relatively homogenous and highly optimized production-based computing system.

SCS Computing Facility

The SCS facility supports an aggregate of over 1000 CPUs representing an assortment of computer architectures, interconnects, and operating systems.  Systems hosted in the SCS facility are owned by SCS and non-SCS research groups and are dedicated to a wide range of research problems including; molecular biophysics, evolutionary biology, network modeling, and Monte-Carlo algorithm development.  The SCS facility is equipped with two 40- ton HVAC cooling units, 1000 ft2 of raised floor, an extensive power distribution system, and two large-format PowerWare UPS battery backup systems.  Plans are currently underway to install a diesel-powered backup generator, which will provide backup power to all of the hardware and HVACs in this room. The SCS network is built on a 10 Gbps Cisco backbone, providing connectivity to a switching infrastructure and to key servers and storage. The SCS network connects to the 10 Gbps FSU campus backbone via 1 and 10 Gbps uplinks, which in turn connect to the 10 Gbps Florida LamdaRail.

FSU Shared-HPC

The SCS also manages the FSU shared-HPC facility, which supports multidisciplinary computing for the FSU research community.  The shared-HPC is in the first phase of construction and currently provides 2.3 TFLOPS of throughput.  Phase II, slated for summer of 2008, will likely increase the throughput of the HPC by a factor of three.  The HPC system consists of 128 Dell PowerEdge SC1435 compute nodes (512 CPUs) and 4 Dell PowerEdge 6950 head nodes.  A Cisco 288-port non-blocking DDR infiniband switch and a 1 Gbps Cisco 6500 Ethernet switch for management and storage connected servers.  All compute and log in nodes have access to a 78 TB Panasas high performance parallel Object Storage Devise.  The shared-HPC is housed at the FSU central computing facility, which has a robust environmental and electrical infrastructure to accommodate current and future computing requirements.  The HPC network infrastructure is also connected to the 10 Gbps Florida Lambda Rail and FSU Campus backbone.

Scientific Visualization

The SCS supports a general access laboratory for scientific visualization on the fourth floor of the Dirac Science Library.  The Visualization Laboratory is equipped with four specialized workstations, three with GeForce 7900 video cards and the fourth with a Quadro FX4500 and a GeForce 8800 video cards.  Work is currently underway in the Lab to use the CUDA SDK to better utilize the GPUs on these machines for general scientific computing.  Each workstation has 4 GB of RAM as well as a wide range of specialized software for scientific visualization. The workstations have access to over 15 TB of high performance storage.

Thanks to a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation, the SCS seminar room, adjacent to the Visualization Lab., was recently (December 2007) equipped with a high-resolution stereographic projection system to support multidisciplinary scientific visualization.  Four state of the art rear-mounted projectors illuminate an 18' x 8' screen. The system switches between 2d and 3d mode with a simple touch of a button and also support numerous other input devises (e.g., a document camera, DVD/VHS player, cable TV, and two hookups for personal laptops) via a simple to use touch panel screen.

General SCS Infrastructure

The SCS provides office space to SCS faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and other SCS associated support personnel. In addition, designated visitor offices are available. All offices are equipped with a desktop computer and at least two network connections; wireless is available throughout campus. The SCS maintains a computer classroom on the first floor of Dirac Science Library. The room is equipped with 18 Intel-based workstations running LINUX and Microsoft Windows XP.  It is used primarily for classes taught by SCS faculty. In addition to the computer classroom, a large seminar room is located on the fourth floor with a capacity for 80 people and is equipped with a state of the state-of-the-art 3d rear-mounted projection system. Two smaller conference rooms equipped with projection equipment can accommodate smaller groups.  

The SCS also manages approximately 30 servers for core network services using primarily generic Intel-compatible servers running CENTOS (a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux).