Resources Available to UMBC Users
The UMBC provides an integrated array of high performance computing and communications products and related services to their users, including supercomputing-class hardware, software, mass storage systems, file storage areas, consulting services, and training. Information on all of these resources is available on the UMBC web pages or by contacting the UMBC hotline.
Hardware
UMBC operates several supercomputing-class machines:
Lewis, a Dell EM64T cluster system with 128 compute nodes and 512 processors. Each node has 4 or 6 Gbytes of memory and is attached to 50 TBytes of disk using an Infiniband high speed interconnect infrastructure for both processor and storage access. Accessing Lewis. How to correctly submit programs on Lewis.
Clark, a SGI Altix BX2 SMP machine. The system has 64 1.5 GHz Itanium2 processors and 128 Gbytes of shared memory. Accessing Clark. How to correctly submit programs on Clark.
Discovery, front end to a Sun/TimeLogic/FPGA system. It provides access to a cluster of 4 Sun VT240 systems housing 8 TimeLogic DeCypher field programmable gate array (FPGA) search engines. The cluster is used for biomedical research, primarily sequence analysis. About Discovery. To learn about the DeCypher suite of sequence analysis tools go here.
Beagle, a HPC system which is a HP Alphaserver-SC ES45 Cluster comprising 2 4-processor compute nodes with EV6/8 1GHz processors and 4 GBytes of memory. How to correctly submit programs on Beagle.
Software
The most popular software packages are available for computational chemistry, engineering, biomedical databases and sequence analysis, neural sciences and materials science. Some of the most popular packages are listed here by:
We can also acquire other software if requested and if versions are available for our computers.
Mass Storage and Archival Services
Lewis is UMBC's file archival system. Lewis is a combination tape-and-disk system, with 50 Tbytes of disk storage available.
High speed data links transport data between our major computing platforms and Lewis.
We can also provide storage for externally generated data. Contact the UMBC External Relations for more information.
Consulting Services
Our consulting staff can help with technical problems, such as code optimization or even advice on configuring and supporting your own systems.
Individual one-on-one consulting is available to provide support for all phases of problem evolution from inception to final results. This can include software recommendations, formulation of the problem, or optimization of a single processor performance, as well as communications support.
UMBC's hotline is manned by experienced consultants who can answer technical questions about all aspects of the center. Follow-up is usually within one working day to electronic mail questions.
Training
The Education and Training group offers workshops on parallel computing topics. Upon the request of corporate clients, they recently developed a module on "Recommended Programming Practices", which teaches engineers and researchers a standards-based, best-practices approach to software engineering.
These classes can be held at UMBC or at your location.
Account Request and Information
To apply for an an account use the UMBC Computing Resources Account Request Form
All of our important user information is online. If you are unable to find what you are looking for, you can use the search box in the upper right corner of each page or take a look at the site map.