MGHPCC Annual Shutdown Monday, June 2 – Thursday, June 5

The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) will be conducting its annual shutdown for maintenance work on Tuesday, June 3. To prepare for that maintenance, RC will be shutting down all services from Monday, June 2 until Thursday, June 5. Research Computing’s servers and services are physically located at MGHPCC and are included in this shutdown, along with the high performance cluster systems of Harvard, Boston University, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. All RC-managed services will be powered down starting at 6 a.m. ET on Tuesday, June 2. We are currently anticipating that RC-managed services will be powered back on Thursday, June 5, given that all work is completed in a timely manner. For more information, review the full announcement.

All About Explorer and the New H200 GPUs

The Research Computing (RC) Team is excited to announce the new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, “Explorer,” which will supersede the current Discovery Cluster.

The Discovery HPC cluster has served the Northeastern University community extremely well over the last several years, and the Explorer Cluster will chart the path of a new journey in research and learning for the Northeastern community — with a new, more efficient operating system (Rocky Linux 9.3) and state-of-the-art GPU resources for compute-intensive computational science applications (NVIDIA H200).

Discovery is a high performance computing (HPC) resource for the Northeastern University research community. The Discovery cluster is located in the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, MA. MGHPCC is a 90,000 square-foot, 15 megawatt research computing and data center facility that houses computing resources for five institutions: Northeastern, BU, Harvard, MIT, and UMass.

The Discovery cluster provides access to over 50,000 CPU cores and over 525 GPUs to all Northeastern faculty and students free of charge. Hardware currently available for research consists of a combination of Intel Xeon (Cascadelake, Skylake, Broadwell, Haswell, Sandybridge, and Ivybridge) and AMD (Zen, Zen2) CPU microarchitectures. Additionally, a selection of NVIDIA Pascal (P100), Volta (V100), Turing (T4), Ampere (A100), and Hopper (H100) GPUs. Discovery is connected to the university network over 10 Gbps Ethernet (GbE) for high-speed data transfer, and Discovery provides 6 PB of available storage on a high-performance file system. Compute nodes are connected with either 10 GbE or high data rate InfiniBand (200 Gbps or 100 Gbps), supporting all types and scales of computational workloads.