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Minnesota Supercomputer Institute
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About MSI
The Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research is an interdisciplinary research program spanning all colleges of the University of Minnesota. The Institute provides supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and their research groups. It is a linchpin program in the University's broad-based digital technology effort, provides a focal point for collaborative research on supercomputing within the University and the State, and provides an interdisciplinary focus for undergraduate and graduate education related to supercomputing and scientific computing. The Institute's hardware and software resources and technical support are available to researchers at the University of Minnesota and other post-secondary educational institutions in the State of Minnesota.
Institute Resources
In 1981, the University of Minnesota was the first U.S. University to acquire a supercomputer (a Cray-1). The Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide leading edge high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community. Earlier supercomputing resources offered to the University of Minnesota research community have included a Cray-2, an ETA 10, a Cray X-MP, an IBM 3090, a Cray M90, a Cray T3D, a Cray C90, a Cray T3E-900, various IBM SP machines with SilverHawk nodes, WinterHawk nodes, and NightHawk nodes, an SGI Origin 2000 with R12000 nodes, and a Unisys ES7000 system.
The Supercomputing Institute currently provides access to an IBM BladeCenter LS20 Linux cluster, an IBM Power4, an IBM Netfinity Linux cluster, an SGI Altix shared-memory system, and an SGI Altix XE 1300 Linux cluster. These machines constitute the Insititute's core resources.
The Institute has available a wide variety of software packages installed on its resources.
The Institute supports a diversified array of computing laboratories, collaborations, and programs. Laboratories include the Basic Sciences Computing Laboratory, the Scientific Development and Visualization Laboratory, the Biomedical Modeling, Simulation, and Design Laboratory, the Computational Genetics Laboratory, the Scientific Data Management Laboratory, and the LCSE-MSI Visualization Laboratory. Interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs supported by the Institute are the Scientific Computing and Computational Neuroscience programs. Finally, the Institute cooperates with IBM on the University of Minnesota-IBM Computational Life Sciences Program.
Several administrative tasks are involved in making supercomputing resources available for researchers:
- cooperating with external resource providers to determine equipment costs, rates, and services available and to make optimal purchases
- announcing resource availability and issuing calls for resource allocation requests
- reviewing requests and awarding resource allocations
- monitoring and adjusting allocations for unanticipated needs
- providing support for grant proposal preparation and other researcher needs and administering grants that reside in the Institute.
Other Institute benefits for researchers:
In addition to access to and support for use of supercomputing resources, the Institute offers researchers the following benefits:
- computational work rooms, both close to the supercomputing equipment and close to other activities on campus; rooms include general and specialized furnishings
- access to facilities for out-state researchers and for other visitors
- communications networks
- workstations, including various specialized graphics and visualization devices, software development ports and file servers
- disk and magnetic tape storage
Conclusion
The Institute carries out long-range planning to ensure, as well as possible, that University spending in the high-performance computing area meets the requirements of faculty carrying out research in this area.