The Smithsonian Institution High Performance Cluster (SI/HPC), informally known as "Hydra" is the primary high performance computing resource at the Smithsonian Institution.
- It is housed at the Ashburn Data Center, VA and is supported by ODI/CDAIO/DPAC.
- Hydra is a Linux distributed cluster consisting of
- some 5,900 CPU cores,
- distributed over ~80 compute nodes,
- totaling over 43TB of total RAM,
- all interconnected using 10Gbps Ethernet and 100Gps InfiniBand fabrics
- Some 4PB of storage is available using a 3-tier architecture:
- high availability disk space (NetApp, via NFS),
- high performance disk space (GPFS, via IB), and
- near-line low cost disk space (NAS/ZFS, via NFS), only on a subset of nodes.
Requesting an Account on Hydra
- Accounts are requested via OCIO's Accounts & Access Service Now Catalog,
- select the HPC Account Request,
- As of Jun 2026, this applies to all SI's users, i.e., including SAO/CfA's affiliates.
Citing Hydra and its DOI
If you have used Hydra for work that will be a part of a scholarly or professional publication, please cite it.
Here is a citation example:
"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".
We also would very much appreciate being notified of such citations, so please email us ([email protected]) the reference to the citation, and if you can think of one, add a nice illustration with a short caption in layperson's terms.
Last updated SGK.