Hardware

Our group owns a 96-core PowerEdge R940 server, two 32-core PowerEdge R910 servers, and two 20-core Precision 7920 workstations from Dell, in addition to a number of well-configured quad- and dual-core Dell PCs and Origin 2000 from SGI.

The PowerEdge R940 system is a powerful multi-processor computer server that contains, as major components, 96 cores, arranged as four 24-core Intel Xeon Gold 6252 2.1 GHz processors, 1 TB RAM, 6 SAS disks, 1.8TB each, arranged in RAID configuration to increase I/O performance, in addition to a 240 GB local disk for the operating system, software, and user space. Each of the two PowerEdge R910 nodes is a powerful multi-processor computer server that contains, as major components, 32 cores, arranged as four 8-core Intel Xeon X7560 2.26GHz processor boards, and 256 GB RAM. Both nodes have multiple 300 GB disks arranged in RAID configurations to increase I/O performance (10 SAS disks, 300 GB each, per scratch space on each node), plus additional disks for the operating systems, software, and user space. Each of the 20-core Precision 7920 systems contains two 10-core Intel Xeon Silver 4114 2.2 GHz processors. One of these two systems has 192 GB RAM, two 2 TB disks constituting scratch space, and a 256 GB solid state drive. The second one has 512 GB RAM, three 1.8 TB disks constituting scratch space, and a 256 GB solid state drive. Each of the above systems is equipped with sizable user and scratch disk spaces, as summarized above, but, to facilitate storing large amounts of data generated in some of our computations, we also have a massive storage facility consisting of six very large disks, 4 TB each.

We are most grateful to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for providing us with funds that enabled us to purchase the above PowerEdge R940 system. We are also most grateful to the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy for providing us with funds that were needed to purchase the above PowerEdge R910 and one of the two Precision 7920 Dell systems. We acknowledge generous support from the Office of Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, Michigan State University Foundation Strategic Partnership Grants Program, and College of Natural Science at MSU for providing us with funds that helped us acquire Precision 7920 systems from Dell. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation of the United States for providing us with funds that allowed us to purchase PCs used by members of our group and the aforementioned massive disk storage.

In addition to the above computers, we have dedicated access to a third 32-core PowerEdge R910 Dell node, which can only be used by theory groups in our department. We also have priority access to three 28-core nodes, shared by our group and three groups from MSU's College of Engineering, which were purchased using a combination of funds provided by the Strategic Partnership Grant and the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER) at MSU. These three 28-core nodes are part of a much larger iCER's compute cluster. Some of our calculations are performed using computational resources provided by iCER through the High-Performance Computing Center at MSU.