So you’ve been thinking about buying a high performance compute (HPC) cluster with your next grant proposal. It would be a handy asset to have in your research but there isn’t any expertise on campus that can build or manage one for you. Does that mean your going to have to learn it yourself and do it? It can certainly take away a lot of time from doing the actual research that you had planned.

Don’t let the thoughts of getting the cluster up and running scare you. Let us Help! We can help you spec out the hardware and get quotes for your grant proposal. When your funding is approved and you purchase the hardware we’ll come in and get started putting it all together. Once it’s up and running basic maintenance is relatively simple. Perhaps even then you can outsource that task to your local IT department or purchase a yearly support contract. We’ll get the cluster running with a queue system, personalized web site of instructions on how to use the system, performance monitoring software, hardware assembly, kickstart re-Imagining software, as well as integrating the computers into your current authentication systems in place as well as backups.

I’ve worked with many types of systems…  Sun, HP, Dell, SGI, SuperMicro and Apple Xerve are just a few. From experience working in a 12,000 sq ft. data center at Applied Theory it came in handy building this server room at Hamilton. This picture shows a majority of the equipment I’ve managed for the College.

List of Clusters built/managed:

1. Olympus – (Shared Memory)  SGI Origin 300
2. Pompeii – (Beowulf)
3. Marcy – (Shared Memory)
4. Gothics – (Shared Memory)
5. Urbee – (Shared Memory)
6. Kilburn – (Shared Memory)
7. Iroquois – (Shared Memory)
8. Herculaneum – (Beowulf)
9. Avalanche – (Shared Memory)
10. Freya – (Beowulf)
11. Xserv – (Beowulf)
12. Una – (Beowulf)
13. Haystack – (Shared Memory)
14. BioMath – (Beowulf)