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HPC Wire: The Week in Review

Source: HPC Wire

A Cluster of Their Own

What happens to all the fancy supercomputers that universities get? Namely, who gets to use them? One imagines they are used mostly by researchers in pursuit of lofty science goals, but how much time is left over for student learners? Well someone at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology must have been asking similar questions, which led to this week's announcement of a supercomputing cluster dedicated exclusively to student use. The cluster was named "Arete," which comes from the Greek quality of excellence in fulfilling one's full potential and purpose. Indeed.

From the announcement:

"Faculty and research staff are the primary users for LSU's existing supercomputing systems, and we realized it is important, as part of our academic mission, to also provide students with opportunities to use these machines," said CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck. "With Arete, we are happy to provide a resource for the whole campus so students can take the skills they learn in the classroom and put them into practice, giving them a much deeper appreciation of how this technology is advancing research in many disciplines."

A 72-node cluster with a peak performance of 5.3 teraflops, Arete is comparable to other high-end resources on campus. It is already installed and operational and will go live at the start of the Spring 2010 semester. The first student group to be assigned time on Arete will come from a CSC 7600 class, called "High Performance Computing: Models, Methods and Means," which Department of Computer Science Professor Thomas Sterling will teach this spring.

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