HPC at UNBC
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High Performance Computing at UNBC


The High Performance Computing (HPC) Lab at UNBC was founded in 2000 with $1.4M funding from CFI, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, Silicon Graphics Inc., and UNBC donors. Professor Peter Jackson was the project lead. The facility was comprised of a 28-processor SGI Origin 3400 with 14 GB of memory (fraser.unbc.ca) and a lab for research users to access the infrastructure. Since June 2005, we have commissioned our "Enhanced High Performance Computing Center" that represents an investment of over $2M by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the BC Knowledge Development Fund, Silicon Graphics Inc., and DELL. The Enhanced HPC systems include a 64-processor SGI Altix 3000 (columbia.unbc.ca), a 128-processor ACT Opteron cluster (cluster.unbc.ca), a 9.6 TB file server, two visualization systems (GeoWall), a Dell 4-processor Windows server (pg-hpc-ts-01) and 10 Dell 2-processor workstations, as well as software packages. In 2012, with the funds provided by the VP Research of UNBC (Dr. Gail Fondahl), we purchased a Dell cluster (Intel Xeon Processor E5-2690) which includes 176 compute cores (rocks.unbc.ca). In 2014, with the support of the VP Research of UNBC (Dr. Ranjana Bird), we were able to replace some of our aging workstations at the HPC lab. In 2016, with the funds provided by the VP Research of UNBC (Dr. Geoff Payne), we purchased a Dell server chassis holding 4 server nodes (Dell PowerEdge C6320). In 2018, we were able to massively improve our computing power by bringing in a new Dell cluster with Intel Xeon Gold 6140 and Silver 4114 processors (klinaklini.unbc.ca). The cluster has a total of 596 core processors. This project was jointly funded by UNBC and the Hakai Institute and coordinated by Professor Brian Menounos.