Facilities

The VCU High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) core facility occupies approximately 2,000 square feet of space, predominantly on the third floor of Harris Hall on the Monroe Park campus. The mission of the HPRC is to provide high performance computing services for the VCU research community. To accomplish this goal, the HPRC maintains four major supercomputing clusters, each specialized for different computing environments:

1. teal.hprc.vcu.edu is the primary cluster intended for large scale parallel computing. It is especially well suited for applications such as molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemistry and other physical sciences jobs. Teal consists of ~5104 64-bit Intel and AMD compute cores, each with 2-4 GB RAM/core; 10.2 TB of total RAM; 180 TB of /home space; tmp space of between 360 and 787 GB per node; several GPU nodes; and a high speed 20 Gb/second Infiniband architecture.
2. huff.hprc.vcu.edu is the newest cluster for large scale parallel and distributed computing. Huff includes regular computing nodes, large memory nodes, and GPU nodes. Huff uses new processors (AMD EPYC2) with a total of 5,120 cores (10,240 threads or vcores), new high performance storage (a 2.1 PB Lustre filesystem), and integrates five GPU systems (3 each with dual 32GB V100 GPUs and 512GB of RAM and 2 each with 4x 80GB A-100 and 1 TB of RAM). Nodes in the basic queue (partition) have 128 cores (256 vcores) and 256 or 512GB of RAM. Nodes in the Large queue have 256 cores and 1 TB of RAM.
3. godel.hprc.vcu.edu is optimized for bioinformatics applications, with 1624 Intel and AMD 64 bit cores, each with at least 3 GB RAM/core, 4.8 TB of total RAM, 17 TB of /home space, tmp space of at least 180 GB/node, a GPU system and 40 Gb/second Infiniband networking, and 1.2TB of GPFS high performance parallel file system storage.
4. fenn.hprc.vcu.edu is designed to support research using data that must comply with federal security and privacy requirements (CAT I data). It consists of 1016 Intel 64 bit cores, 2/GB of RAM/core, 900 TB of GPFS high performance parallel file system storage (expandable to 2.2PB), and 54 Gb/second Infiniband networking. The Fenn system employs a security model that requires all access via VPN, and exists on a separate virtual and physical network from other university and HPRC resources.

To support this infrastructure, the HPRC employs 6 FTE staff positions: Alberto Cano, faculty director, Mike Davis, technical director; three systems analysts; and an applications analyst. In addition to maintaining the hardware, the HPRC works collaboratively with VCU researchers to maintain and optimize a large number of applications and development tools (BLAST, R, MATLAB, NAMD, Gaussian, Gromacs, Charm, C/C++, Fortran compilers) as well as other scientific, statistical and development software.