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.

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. 

*: 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  SGK/MPK.

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