COMPUTING RESOURCES - CTBP condos

Typically, condos are the owner-accessible only computing resources in partnership with the Center for Research Computing. CTBP, as one of the prestigious NSF sponsored Physics Frontiers Centers, and an important component of the Office of Research of Rice University, purchased a set of condos, which have been accommodated into different platforms of CRC computing infrastructures. Here are the more details:

Condos on NOTS supercomputer. There are three types of CPUs: Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 v2 @2.60GHz (Ivy Bridge CPUs), Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 @2.20 GHz (Broadwell CPUs), and the Intel Xeon Gold 6126 @2.60GHz (Skylake CPUs). These CPUs are distributed into two computing queues, i.e. ctbp-onuchic, which is only accessible to members of Onuchic Group, the total number of CPUs are 16(nodes) x16 (CPUs/node) + 8 x 24 + 8 x 24 = 640, and the CPU peak TFLOPS are 5.32 + 5.53 + 10.44 = 21.29; and ctbp-common, which is accessible to all CTBP users, the total CPUs are 24 x 16 + 16 x 24 + 12 x 24 = 1056), and the CPU peak TFLOPS are 7.99 + 11.05 + 15.67 = 34.71. In total, CTBP condos have 56.0 CPU peak TFLOPS.

Condos on DAVinCI supercomputer. These initial computing nodes are composed of Intel Xeon E5-2660 Sandy Bridge-EP @2.20 GHz. The CPUs are distributed into three queues, i.e. ctbp-onuchic (which are only accessible to members of Onuchic Group, in total CPUs of 12 x 16 = 192), ctbp-common (accessible to all CTBP users, total CPUs as 8 x 16 = 128) and the ctbp-wolynes (only accessible to members of Wolynes Group, and the total CPUs are 4 x 16 = 64). The total CPU peak TFLOPS are 3.38 + 2.26 + 1.13 = 6.77, although these CPUs are pretty old and will to be decommissioned soon.

In addition of these condos, CTBP users also have shared access to the supercomputers which are run and maintained by the Center for Research Computing. These three supercomputers are:

NOTS supercomputer, which so far, has 136 nodes of Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, 28 nodes of Intel Broadwell CPUs, and 60 nodes of Intel Skylake CPUs.
DAVinCI supercomputer, which has 2400 processor cores in 192 Intel Westmere nodes and 24 Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.
PowerOmics supercomputer, which has 6 IBM POWER8 S822L nodes. Each node has 24 IBM POWER8 processors, and each processor supports 8 threads.

COMPUTING RESOURCES - XSEDE computers

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is, outside of Rice campus, the NSF sponsored single virtual system which is shared by scientists all over the United States. The XSEDE system provides all kinds of services, such as computing resources, data sciences, project development, and training for specific computing topics. The XSEDE User Portal provides an interactive user-friendly interface to connect XSEDE resources, and instructions of how to write a successful XSEDE proposal. When your computing problems exceed the capabilities of Rice supercomputers, you are encouraged to apply for XSEDE computing time. At this point, you may turn to the XSEDE campus champions at Rice University for the help of drafting the proposal, justifying the computing time for your project, and doing test runs for the scalability and performance of your protocols. CTBP has established a good tradition and outstanding examples of successful applications of typical XSEDE resources, at TACC Stampede2, the SDSC Comet, the PSC Bridges and Anton, and achieved great research results.

For additional supporting about computational research at CTBP, you are encouraged to read the Computing FAQs.

RESEARCH RESOURCES - Office of Research

The Rice Office of Research provide services to faculty and staff for funding opportunities; research proposal development and submission to federal agencies (e.g. NSF and the NIH) and other entities as the CPRIT, the Welch Foundation); and the guidance for Rice Conflict of Interest Policies, and the Research Policies.

RESEARCH RESOURCES - Other Institutes

As an example, the Fondren Library provides some workshops by Digital Media Commons, such as “video editing with iMovie”, “Creating an Academic Poster with PowerPoint”, etc. Another example is the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I) at Rice campus provides broad support for the advancement of research in the fields of computing, data science and information technology. The K2I holds annually conferences (e.g. data science conference), seminars and lectures on selected computing topics, and summer camps (e.g. HPC Boot Camp).