High Performance Computing Capabilities

CAVS is a member of Mississippi State University's High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2). The HPC2 provides substantial high performance computing resources to its member centers. In addition to the following supercomputer systems, the HPC2 has smaller x86 Windows and Linux-based servers that provide computational services for various groups and individual projects.

Shadow

  • Cray CS300-LC cluster with 4800 Intel Ivy Bridge processor cores and 28,800 Intel Xeon Phi cores
  • Each node has either 512 GB of RAM (45%), 128 GB of RAM (45%) or 64 GB of RAM (10%) for a system total of 70 TB of RAM
  • Each node interconnects via FDR InfiniBand (56 Gb/s)
  • Peak performance of 593 teraFLOPS (trillion calculations per second)
  • Uses a warm-water cooling to cool the system with water as warm as 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius)
top 500 logo green 500 logo

On Top500's June 2015 Supercomputer Sites list, Shadow was ranked as the 143rd fastest computer in the world and the 11th most powerful computer at any academic site in the United States. As the first production system of its kind to use a warm-water cooling system, Shadow was ranked as the 16th most energy efficient supercomputer in the world according to Top500's June 2015 Green500 list.

Talon

  • 3072 core cluster composed of 256 IBM iDataPlex nodes
  • Each diskless node has two six-core Intel Westmere processors (2.8GHz) and 24 GB of memory (for a total of 6TB)
  • Uses Voltaire quad data-rate InfiniBand (40Gb/s) for high performance interconnect and a gigabit ethernet for data and systems management
  • Peak performance of over 34.4 teraFLOPS (trillion calculations per second)
top 500 logo green 500 logo

Talon debuted as the 331st entry on the June 2010 Top500 Rankings. In June 2010, the Green500 list named Talon as the most energy efficient general purpose supercomputer in the world, and the ninth most energy efficient system overall.

Raptor

  • 2048 core cluster composed of 512 Sun Microsystems SunFire X2200 M2 servers
  • Each server has two dual-core AMD Opteron 2218 processors (2.6GHz) and 8 GB of memory, for a total of 4TB
  • Composed completely of diskless compute nodes
  • Uses gigabit ethernet to connect the 32 nodes in each rack together, and 10 GbE to connect the 16 racks to one another
  • Peak performance of over 10.6 teraFLOPS (trillion calculations per second)
top 500 logo

Raptor debuted as the 115th most powerful computer in the world and the 18th most powerful computer at any academic site in the United States on Top 500's November 2006 Supercomputer Sites list.