The Richmond Computing Clusters
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Welcome
Welcome to the Supercomputing Clusters of the Physics Department at the University of Richmond!

The Physics Department at University of Richmond operates a 53-node research cluster (nodes are mostly dual 1.4 GHz Athlon class). The system runs Linux and uses the Beowulf system for managing batch jobs.

The Research cluster is funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Richmond. There is one internal user and several outside users.




The Research cluster (SpiderWulf). There are currently 53 nodes.

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History
The cluster project at Richmond began in the spring of 1999. Professors Mike Vineyard and Jerry Gilfoyle realized the need for a quantum leap in computing power to support their research in nuclear physics at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). Using funds from their Department of Energy (DOE) research grant and other monies from the University, they put together a prototype computing cluster in the summer of 1999. That prototype is shown below. It is no longer operational.

The current Research cluster was assembled by LinuxLabs in the winter of 2001-2002 and arrived in February 2002. After a long commissioning phase, the cluster became fully operational in fall, 2002. The funds for the project came from a successful grant application by Dr. Gilfoyle and Dr. Vineyard to the Major Research Instrumentation Program of the National Science Foundation for $175,000. The current configuration consists of 49, 512-MByte-RAM, 1.4 GHz Athlon slave nodes and one master. Each node has a single 18-GByte disk. It is supported by 3 TBytes of space in three RAID disks and communicating by another 1.4 GHz Athlon fileserver.



Prototype Research cluster consisting of 12 nodes.



This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0116349.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Jerry Gilfoyle, ggilfoyl@richmond.edu