HPCC Resources and Services

For a description of HPCC clusters and equipment, click here.

To request support or to arrange a visit to the HPCC facilities, click here.

HPCC Software Services

A major part of the HPCC mission is maintaining the system software on the central clusters and the local grids, as well as the application software on the central clusters, local grids, and remote grids. Most of the standard open-source packages in the base Linux distribution are installed on our clusters. Beyond these, we have installed a number of additional packages, and can install new common-use software when required as long as it is appropriately licensed.

For software unique to a particular researcher or small research group that can be installed without root privileges, we encourage users to install and manage such software on their own. If you have a package that requires root privileges to install, or that will most likely be useful for a large number of HPCC users, please fill out the HPCC software request form at the link below:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/hpcc/operations/requestsoftware.php

Some application packages and a few of the libraries that we install and maintain include:

• Intel compilers, debuggers, and math libraries
• Totalview debugger
• MPI software: Open MPI, MVAPICH2
• Math libraries: Intel MKL, BLAS, and FFTW
• Quantum Chemistry codes: LAMMPS and NWChem
• Molecular dynamics codes: NAMD and Venus
• Math languages/application: R and MATLAB
• Weather modeling codes: WRF and Netcdf

Currently there are approximately 200 application directories in the Hrothgar shared application file system. The best way to determine what is installed is to sign in to the cluster and issue the "module spider" command. Further details on the use of modules are in the HPCC New user Training slides. In addition HPCC staff has and will assist users to compile and build applications in the user's own directories.

Other HPCC Services

HPCC provides consulting services for a variety of applications that exploit serial and parallel computing environments to address application specific scientific computing challenges. Our services include working closely with researchers and their students in migrating computer programs from PC to Linux environments, code optimization and parallelization strategies, and introducing campus researchers to national scale resources wherever requested computing time exceeds campus limitations. TTU HPCC is an active partner in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Lonestar 6 cluster. As a result TTU researchers have access to 300K Service Units (SUs) per year for 5 years. To request an allocation, visit the TACC portal. Once we are aware of your request, approval on our part is very quick, and you can be running within minutes.

We also help campus researchers find potential interdisciplinary and intercampus collaborations where computing is the common denominator. We do this by organizing seminars and meeting with various research groups on campus. We do this both for groups that are currently involved in compute modeling and those that are thinking about it. Please feel free to contact us at hpccsupport@ttu.edu if you would like our help.

If you need help in bidding a system either for a proposal or to purchase on a grant, we can help you in designing and getting a bid for an appropriate system.