The UMBC High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) is a community-based, interdisciplinary core facility for scientific computing and research. Started in 2008 by more than 20 researchers from more than ten departments and research centers from all three colleges, it is supported by faculty contributions, federal grants, and the UMBC administration. Since its inception, the facility has grown to support more than 150 research groups and 800 active users at UMBC and beyond. The facility is open to researchers affiliated with the university at no charge. Researchers can also purchase nodes for long-term priority access. System administration is provided by the UMBC Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Governance is provided by DoIT, the UMBC Office of Research and Creative Achievement (ORCA), and faculty from colleges and research centers at UMBC via the Shared Infrastructure Group.
The HPCF is composed of advanced CPU and GPU compute resources along with the enterprise research storage system, Retriever Research Storage (RRStor). These resources and storage is all connected via advanced networking provided by Infiniband and high-speed ethernet to ensure high data throughput and availability.
The advanced compute resources are “clustered” together in a so-called high performance computing cluster(HPCC) named chip. The underlying compute resources composing chip are complemented or decommissioned every few years to align with evolving technologies or aging hardware.
Previous instances of UMBC’s HPCF HPCC were ada, taki, maya, tara, and hpc.
For a complete description, including pictures, please view the system description. The HPCF has supported dozens of PI’s and over 85 research projects.