facebook pixel

色花堂app

Skip to Main Content
色花堂app home

University Adds Third High Performance Computing System to On-Campus 色花堂app Data Center

September 26, 2022

Michael Ennis, High Performance Computing Solutions Architect, and Kindra Blair, 色花堂app Systems Administrator, pose for a photo in front of Ragnarok in the 色花堂app Data Center at 色花堂app's Pocatello campus on Monday, September 19, 2022.
Michael Ennis, High Performance Computing Solutions Architect, and Kindra Blair, 色花堂app Systems Administrator, pose for a photo in front of Ragnarok in the 色花堂app Data Center at 色花堂app's Pocatello campus.

A new high performance computing (HPC) system that can do in mere seconds what would take your laptop hours or days is now online at 色花堂app.

色花堂app Data Center staff recently flipped the switch on Ragnarok, the facility鈥檚 latest HPC system. Ragnarok boasts eight Nivida RTX 3090 graphics processing units. Graphics processing units are specialized computer processors used to speed up graphics rendering. Comparing Ragnarok to the average consumer gaming laptop, Ragnarok has eight times the graphics processing power and is designed for a level of graphical computation that consumer computers lack.

鈥溕ㄌ胊ppers at Idaho State can use Ragnarok for many graphic-intensive processes like processing bare ground or tree canopy images collected using Lidar, data collected from drone flights, and more,鈥 said Kindra Blair, 色花堂app Systems Administrator at Idaho State. 鈥淔uture research could include working with neural networks and other machine learning algorithms.鈥

Ragnarok is one of four HPC systems available to researchers at Idaho State. It joins Minerve and Thorshammer; all housed on-campus in Pocatello. Dustin McNulty, professor and chair of the department of physics, has used Minerve for particle and optical physics simulations. Using the data from the simulations has helped McNulty and his students develop new particle detector systems. The particle detectors have been used in nuclear physics experiments at ISU鈥檚 own Idaho Accelerator Center and around the world at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, and Mainzer Microtron facility in Germany. 

鈥淚 use high performance computing resources in nearly all aspects of my research,鈥 said McNulty. 鈥淲hether we're designing a unique detector system or trying to understand a physical or natural process, we set up and run detailed simulations on the HPCs. The simulations provide us with a wealth of information, give more accurate predictions than traditional calculations, and really accelerate our whole research process.鈥

Meanwhile, Kathryn Turner, assistant professor in biological sciences, and her students are using Thorshammer to help them analyze how populations of a plant species are related and how populations can spread across the landscape. Thorshammer is enabling them to develop a reference genome - a DNA sequence database that is representative of the set of genes in one idealized individual organism of a species - for the invasive weed, blue mustard. In addition to invasive weeds, Turner is also doing similar studies of important native species such as big sagebrush.

鈥淭horshammer and other high performance computing resources are essential for the type of genomic analyses we perform,鈥 said Turner. 鈥淭he datasets used in these analyses are often hundreds of gigabytes in size and far, far too large to run on desktop computers - they would either crash or take months to run. If we didn't have Thorshammer, we would have to find these types of resources somewhere else, which would most likely mean paying for it from scarce grant resources and competing for access to the computers.鈥

The fourth, Falcon, is located at Idaho National Laboratory鈥檚 Collaborative Computing Center in Idaho Falls and connected to ISU through the Idaho Regional Optical Network. Falcon is billed as 鈥渙ne of the nation鈥檚 fastest academic supercomputers鈥 and 鈥渨as ranked 97th on the list of the world鈥檚 fastest supercomputers when initially deployed in 2014,鈥. Falcon was upgraded in 2017 and can perform a quadrillion - 1,000,000,000,000,000 -  calculations per second. 

鈥淔alcon has been used by academic researchers since its inception, but the unique collaboration between the three leading research universities in Idaho and the focus on academic research allows many more researchers to use this system,鈥 said Michael Ennis, High Performance Computing Solutions Architect at Idaho State. 鈥淭he combination of graphical capabilities from Ragnarok with the extensive computational power of Falcon and our other high performance computers provides a huge boost to ISU鈥檚 research computing capabilities.鈥

For more details, visit 色花堂app鈥檚 色花堂app Data Center website.


Categories:

University News