High Performance Computing

Welcome the Smithsonian Institution High Performance Computing Wiki.

This Wiki holds information for the use of HPC resources at the Smithsonian.

Central to the SI HPC resources is the Smithsonian Institution High Performance Cluster (SI/HPC), named Hydra.

• High performance computing is administered by the Office of Research Computing within OCIO.
• The OCIO Herndon Data Center in Herndon, VA houses the high performance computing cluster, Hydra.

• The documentation is organized as follows:
  
  • Overview;
    • Citing/Acknowledging Hydra;
  • What's New;
  • Policies;
  • Introduction to Hydra Training;
  • Quick Start guide;
  • Reference pages;
  • FAQs;
  • Cluster Upgrades
• The complete documentation can be downloaded as a PDF document (182 pages).

What's New

• November 15, 2002

The migration of the 'disks' /home and /share/apps to a hybrid aggregate (a more performant set of disks that combines SSD and HDDs) was completed this past weekend. This will speed up access to the files stored under /home and /share/apps.

• • • As a result, the total size of /home is slightly smaller, while the sizes of /data/sao and /data/genomics have been increased.

    • Quotas have not been changed.

    • If /home fills up too quickly we may have to reduce the quota on /home. 

    • Users who want to use /data need to request access  (up to 2TB of un-scrubbed space); non-SAO users should contact Rebecca, SAO users should contact Sylvain,

Please refer to Disks Space and Usage on the Wiki's Reference pages as to what disks to use and what to store where.

• November 7, 2022
  • 21 new compute nodes were added to Hydra as compute-65-xx (Dell R6515: AMD EPYC CPUs, 64 cores, 512GB memory).
  • All compute nodes with an AMD EPYC CPU have their "cpu_arch" set to "zen."
  • All the old compute-81-xx nodes (Dell R815) have been retired. 

• If  you have any questions or encounter any problems, email:

  SI-HPC-Admin@si.edu	for sys-admin related issues,
  SI-HPC@si.edu	for non-SAO users who need help,
  hpc@cfa.harvard.edu	for SAO users who need help.

• Past news with more details can be found at the What's New page.

Quick Links

• Cluster Status Page at SAO
• Cluster Status Page at OCIO^*
• QSub Generator ^*

^*: these pages are only accessible from trusted machines: within SI or SAO networks, or using VPN.

 Reminder

• References to Hydra (publications, proposals, etc.) should mention the cluster as:

Smithsonian Institution High Performance Computing Cluster. Smithsonian Institution. https://doi.org/10.25572/SIHPC.

• or as an acknowledgment:

"(Some of) [Tt]he computations in this paper were conducted on the Smithsonian High Performance Cluster (SI/HPC), Smithsonian Institution. https://doi.org/10.25572/SIHPC". 

Last updated 15 Nov 2022 SGK/MPK.