The following document is intended to be suitable for inclusion in a grant submission, where information regarding Universities computing facilities is required.

FSU Shared-HPC

Florida State University supports a shared High-Performance Computing facility for multidisciplinary research.  The shared-HPC facility comprises computing and data storage resources well suited for distributed and shared memory parallel computations, high throughput computing for serial computations, interactive and remote visualization, and web-based science portals and databases. Taken together HPC provides over 74.2 TeraFlops of peak performance on over 6800 cpu cores. The shared-HPC facility also supports several high-end GPU devices for CUDA- and openCL-based computations.  Our diverse computing systems are bound together by two parallel data storage systems and a common user authentication mechanism. FSU's shared-HPC facility is housed in two robust data center with an environmental and electrical infrastructure designed to accommodate current and future computing requirements. The HPC network infrastructure is connected to FSU’s 10 Gbps campus network backbone and to the 10 Gbps Florida Lambda Rail.

Scientific Visualization

FSU also supports a general access laboratory for scientific visualization in the Department of Scientific Computing. The laboratory is located in the center of the main FSU campus on the fourth-floor of the Dirac Science Library (DSC). The Visualization Laboratory hosts five high-end visualization workstations each equipped with NVIDIA GPU video cards that are compatible with the CUDA SDK. One workstation is equipped with software and emitters for 3D stereographic visualization.  All workstations have access to over 15 TB of shared high performance storage.

The University visualization resources also include a high-resolution stereographic projection system, funded by the National Science Foundation, to support multidisciplinary scientific visualization. The system is located in an 80-person seminar room adjacent to the Visualization Lab. Four state of the art rear-mounted projectors illuminate an 18' x 8' screen. The system switches between 2D and 3D mode with a touch of a button and also supports numerous other input devices (e.g., a document camera, DVD/VHS player, cable TV, and two hookups for personal laptops) via a simple to use touch panel screen.

Additional Campus Data Centers

The Department of Scientific Computing maintains a robust computing facility in the middle of the main FSU campus for hosting departmental and non-department computing resources. The DSC facility and staff currently support over 1000 processor cores in aggregate, representing an assortment of computer architectures, interconnects, and operating systems. Systems are dedicated to a wide range of research problems including; molecular biophysics, evolutionary biology, network modeling, Monte-Carlo algorithm development, and more.  The DSC facility is equipped with two 40- ton HVAC cooling units, 1000 ft2 of raised floor, an extensive power distribution system, two large-format PowerWare UPS battery backup systems, and a 550 KVA diesel-powered backup generator, which provides backup power to all of the hardware and HVACs in this room. The DSC network is built on a 10 Gbps Cisco backbone, providing connectivity to a switching infrastructure and to key servers and storage. The DSC network connects to the 10 Gbps FSU campus backbone via one and 10 Gbps uplinks, which in turn connect to the 10 Gbps Florida LamdaRail.