Beowulf Cluster

The department operates a highly customized in-house computer cluster based on the Beowulf architecture. Funded by the National Science Foundation and Intel Corporation, the cluster consists of rackmounted computing nodes with Intel Xeon CPUs connected by a fast private network. The cluster is online and operational 24/7 all year around and has a peak performance of 600 Gflops (Summer 2007).

The main uses for the cluster include computational chemistry (Professors Kitchin & Sholl) and large-scale optimization (Professors Biegler & Hauan) with individual studies running anywhere from just a few hours or up to several weeks. All jobs are continuously tracked through our web based monitoring system and the allocation of computing resources is managed by a commercial grade batch system to ensure efficient throughput in a user friendly manner. By sharing the cluster between multiple research groups with different usage patterns, we have a flexible situation where each student or post. doc may run a large number of simultaneous jobs when needed.

For dynamic status information and more details about hardware, software and connectivity, please see the cluster's web pages found at http://beowulf.cheme.cmu.edu .