Research Computing Announcements:

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).

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Scratch Purge Scheduled for Tuesday, June 17, 2025

June 13, 2025

To ensure adequate resources for all users, the Research Computing team will continue to purge /scratch space monthly. The next purge is planned for Tuesday, June 17, 2025. As a reminder, if you have any data on /scratch that you would like to retain, please move your data into persistent storage, like /work. Research Computing also provides archival storage options in the form of Disk and Tape media.

If you need to expand the amount of storage you have available in /work, please submit a Storage Space Extension Request. If you have any questions, please submit a ticket, drop by our Office Hours, or Schedule a Consultation.

Learn About High Performance Computing at Northeastern

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.

Hardware

Software

Open OnDemand

Data Management

Connecting You to the Power of Discovery

As a researcher at Northeastern University, you can take advantage of the comprehensive research computing offerings and services available to you—including access to centralized high performance computing (HPC) clusters, storage, visualization, software, high-level technical and scientific consultations, documentation, and training.

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Research Computing Office Hours

RC Office Hours are a great way for you to connect with the RC team for short (~10-15 min) consultations. Office Hours are held every Wednesday from 3 – 4 p.m. ET and Thursday from 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET. All current or prospective Discovery users are welcome to join anytime during these hours.

Join Wednesday Office Hours : 3 - 4 p.m. ET

Join Thursday Office Hours : 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. ET

News From the AVP

Research Computing Infrastructure Enhancements: Letter from the AVP

As announced in our prior RC communications and April monthly newsletter, we are excited to share with you that our Research Computing team has significantly enhanced and modernized our computing infrastructure — our new cluster, Explorer, has added 32 state-of-the-art NVIDIA H200 GPU chips and runs on a new, more modern operating system.

Research Computing News at Northeastern

Miniconda3 – from Discovery to Explorer

If you have a Miniconda3 installation in your /work directory on Discovery, you may need to make some changes to continue to use those same Miniconda environments on Explorer.

Convert an sbatch Script from Discovery to Explorer

Hello and welcome! This post provides an example of taking an sbatch script that you previously ran on Discovery and converting the script to run on the Explorer cluster. Confirm that you have access to running jobs on the Explorer cluster by logging in to Explorer....

Explorer for Short-Partition Jobs

The Research Computing team is continuing to add more computing resources to the new Explorer Cluster, as we transition away from the Discovery Cluster. If you are planning to use the short-partition for your jobs, we highly encourage you to use our new Explorer...