High Performance Computing Center Availability on Campus and New Director

Marc Hoit, Interim Associate Provost for IT

The University of Florida has recently upgraded its High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. As a result of completing Phase II, we have an 800 processor system with 45 Terabytes of storage. The system is a result of collaboration between faculty, college administration and university administration. The funding model is a matching program started by faculty grass roots efforts. Phase I was lead by CLAS and Phase II by Engineering. Phase III is being lead by the Health Science Center and has two pending proposals for over $1.2M each.

Use of the computing cluster is open to all UF faculty.
Please see the website for contacts and details: http://hpc.ufl.edu

The HPC effort has been lead by the ITAC-HPC sub-committee. The chair of the committee for the next three years is Dr. Alan George from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The committee is in its annual membership renewal process and welcomes interested faculty and staff.

We would also like to announce that Dr. Erik Deumens has been appointed as the first Director of the HPC Center. Erik will also continue to be the Director for Computing for the Quantum Theory Project (QTP) where he is responsible for operating the computing environment at QTP. Since 1994, he has been involved in the development of a high performance, portable, parallel software library for quantum chemical integrals, called QTIP as testing ground for research and teaching of high quality software engineering. He also lectures on High Performance Computing Topics covering all issues involved in programming for scientific computing: including architecture of modern CPU’s and parallel computers, object oriented design, correct programming, debugging and performance analysis, message passing programming, and thread programming. Erik received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1982 and his DSc in 1984 from the University of Brussels. Erik holds a Scientist faculty line in the departments of Chemistry and Physics and has been at the University of Florida since 1990.