- University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
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The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in Minneapolis, Minnesota is an interdisciplinary research program providing supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and researchers. MSI is located on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus in Walter Library. MSI provides hardware, software, and technical support resources to researchers at the University of Minnesota and other higher educational institutions in Minnesota.
Contents
History
In 1981, the University of Minnesota was the first U.S. University to acquire a supercomputer (a Cray-1). The Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community.
In August 2010, Jorge Viñals, former director of CLUMEQ, a Canadian Supercomputing Center led by McGill University in Montreal and Quebec City, became the new director of MSI. He is also a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota.
Since the August 2010 addition of Jorge Vinals as director of MSI, there have been two rounds of reorganization to the institution. Out of three department directors, the two longest-serving members have chosen to leave MSI.
Mission
The mission of the institute is supercomputing research, broadly defined as involving the use of high-performance computing environments to address problems in the physical, biological, medical, mathematical, and computing sciences and engineering and other fields. The goal is to promote solutions to problems that could not otherwise be resolved.
Supercomputing capabilities
Core resources
- Itasca: HP Linux cluster with 1,091 HP ProLiant BL280c G6 blade servers, each with two-socket, quad-core 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon X5560 "Nehalem EP" processors sharing 24 GB of system memory, with a 40-gigabit QDR InfiniBand (IB) interconnect.
- Calhoun: SGI Altix Altix XE 1300 cluster
- Elmo: Sun Fire X4600 Linux cluster
- Koronis: SGI UV 1000 cluster with associated workstations and storage
Laboratories
- Basic Sciences Computing (BSCL)
- Computational Genetics (CGL)
- Biomedical Modeling, Simulation, and Design (BMSDL)
- LCSE-MSI Visualization Laboratory (LMVL)
- Scientific Data Management (SDML)
- Scientific Development and Visualization (SDVL)
- MSI-UMR BICB Computational Laboratory (UMBCL)
Undergraduate internship program
MSI offers a summer internship program for undergraduates. Interns work with faculty members and their research groups on projects addressing problems in science and engineering. This includes high-performance computing and scientific modeling and simulation, graphics, visualization, informatics, and high-performance network communications.
References
- Moore, Rick. "Blade Runner : UMNews." University of Minnesota. Web. 29 July 2010. <http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_148391.html>.
- Vance, Ashlee. "Minnesota’s Enormous Apples Computer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com." Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com. Web. 29 July 2010. <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/minnesotas-enormous-apples-computer/?scp=2&sq=university of Minnesota supercomputing&st=cse>
External links
Categories:- University of Minnesota
- Supercomputers
- University and college laboratories in the United States
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