MSU-HPC

Mississippi State University High Performance Computing (MSU-HPC)  is funded via a grant from NOAA to support research activities in environmental modeling, including weather modeling and simulation. 

The MSU-HPC system consists of two components, Orion and Hercules. Orion and Hercules share a InfiniBand interconnect and two Lustre file systems.

Orion System Features:

  • Total of 72,000 cores of 2.4GHz Xeon Gold CPU
  • Capability of 5,000 trillion floating point operations per second – or 5.0 petaflops
  • Nearly 350 terabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM)

Hercules System Features:

  • Total of 40,960 cores of 2.3GHz Xeon Platinum CPU
  • Capability of 3,000 trillion floating point operations per second – or 3.0 petaflops
  • Nearly 256 terabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM)

Shared Between the Two HPC Systems:

  • Total scratch disk capacity of 9 Petabytes on the "work" file system
  • Total scratch disk capacity of 18 Petabytes on the "work2" file system

The system provides high performance computing capacity to run large, complex and detailed environmental models, while advancing the historical and on-going relationships between MSU and NOAA scientists. The partnership with MSU provides greater research opportunities with our collaborators and provides millions of compute hours to enhance NOAA’s scientific research. Orion and Hercules the new HPC systems will also be used by research scientists and students working with NOAA, MSU, and the Northern Gulf Institute, NOAA’s cooperative institute based at MSU, which includes five additional academic institutions in Mississippi, Florida and Alabama.

Image is of the Mississippi State University Orion supercomputer located in Starkville, MS. Orion is a Dell supercomputer with 72,000 Skylake Processors and consists of multiple black with blue lighting cabinets (16 are shown in the image). The racks of hardware components are stacked vertically to save space,  allow for ease of connecting the many nodes and cores of the supercomputer, and improve efficiency in cooling. The racks are also labeled with Chilled Door Rack Cooling system and have a status