University of South Dakota Gets HPC Cluster for Research Computing

The University of South Dakota has acquired a high performance computing cluster as a campus-wide resource available to faculty, staff and students as well as researchers across the state.

Made possible by a $504,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a $200,000 grant from the South Dakota Board of Regents, the new cluster is named Lawrence after Nobel Laureate and University of South Dakota alumnus E. O. Lawrence.

“Lawrence makes it possible for us to accelerate scientific progress while reducing the time to discovery,” said Doug Jennewein, the University’s Director of Research Computing. “University researchers will be able to achieve scientific results not previously possible, and our students and faculty will become more engaged in computationally assisted research.”

The Lawrence supercomputer will support 12 STEM projects across several departments at three institutions in North and South Dakota. The system supports multidisciplinary research and research training in scientific domains such as high energy physics, the human brain, renewable energy, and materials science.

“Our new cluster will help researchers answer big questions such as the nature of dark matter, and the links between the human brain and human behavior,” Jennewein said.

Built by Advanced Clustering Technologies, the Lawrence Cluster has a peak theoretical performance of more than 60 TFLOPS. The system architecture includes general-purpose compute nodes, large memory nodes, GPU-accelerated nodes, interactive visualization nodes, and a high speed InfiniBand interconnect.