What is MCSR? Who is MCSR? What Does MCSR Do? Who Does MCSR Serve? What Kinds of Accounts? Why Does Mississippi Need Supercomputers? What Kinds of Research? What Kinds of Instruction? What Kinds of Workshops? How Much Does it Cost? What Kinds of Software? What Supercomputers and Clusters?

What is MCSR? Mississippi Center for Supercomputer Research Established in 1987 by the Mississippi Legislature Mission: Enhance Computational Research Climate at Mississippi’s 8 Public Universities also: Support High Performance Computing (HPC) Education in Mississippi

What Does MCSR Do? We make Mississippi scientists: - more competitive for federal grants - more productive in research We provide extraordinary learning opportunities for Mississippi college students - instructional accounts - computing workshops - helpdesk support

Who Does MCSR Serve? MCSR serves faculty, researchers, and students at all of Mississippi’s 8 public universities Alcorn State University Jackson State University Mississippi Sate University Mississippi Valley State University The University of Southern Mississippi Delta State University The University of Mississippi Mississippi University for Women

Who Uses More MCSR Computing Time?

What Types of Computing Access is Available? Research Accounts - provided for faculty and student “researchers” - good for the duration of employment or enrollment Instructional Accounts - provided at an instructor’s request - for all students enrolled in a semester course - valid for the duration of the semester - can be “converted” to research account

Research vs. Class Accounts?

Who Uses Research Accounts?

Who Uses Instructional Accounts?

Education at MCSR Over 87 University Courses Supported since 2000 C/C++, Fortran, MPI, OpenMP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, Matlab, PHP, Perl, ….

Why Do Mississippi Researchers Need Supercomputers? Economics: researchers in a poor state like Mississippi can still make a big splash. Computational simulations are faster, cheaper, and safer than laboratory experiments alone.

What Kinds of MCSR? 90% of MCSR calculations are computational chemistry Cleanup of high explosive materials. Design of high energy density rocket fuels The chemical underpinnings of high powered lasers Mutation studies of enzyme activity Designing weather-proofing coatings for machinery Other Areas Hurricane forecasting Blast resistant Coatings Better 3-D imaging for diagnosing brain tumors

Training at MCSR MCSR consultants taught over 140 free seminars in FY08. Over 60 training topics available, and growing. Fixed schedule or on-demand. Unix/programming, Math Software, Stats Software, Computational Chemistry Software

Do Researchers and Students Pay to Use MCSR? No. MCSR services are provided at no cost to the individual, department, or institution. Funded researchers may ask for priority access. Mississippi researchers may claim the value of MCSR computing services received as an in-kind contribution from their institution when seeking federal grants.

How Much Does MCSR Cost Mississippi?

What Is the Value of MCSR to Mississippi? RETURN ON INVESTMENT = GRANTS SUPPORTED / MCSR BUDGET For FY 2008: $32,832,097/ $845,535 = $38.30 per dollar spent

What Software MCSR Programming C/C++, FORTRAN, Java, Perl, PHP, MPI… Science/Engineering PV-Wave, IMSL, GSL, Math Libraries, Abaqus Math/Statistics SAS, SPSS, Matlab, Mathematica Chemistry Gaussian, Amber, NWChem, GAMESS, CPMD, MPQC, MolPro, GROMACS

What MCSR?

Supercomputers at MCSR: sweetgum - SGI Origin CPU Supercomputer - 64 GB of shared memory

Supercomputers at MCSR: redwood CPU SGI Altix 3700 Supercomputer GB of shared memory

Supercomputers at MCSR: mimosa -253 CPU Intel Linux Cluster – Pentium 4 -Distributed memory – 500MB – 1GB per node -Gigabit Ethernet

Supercomputers at MCSR: mimosa

Supercomputers at MCSR: sequoia -22 nodes -176 cores -352 GB Memory -20 TB Storage -InfiniBand Interconnect

Supercomputers at MCSR: sequoia