Facilities description

The UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) supports high performance and data intensive computing by the entire UNM community. Resources available to support this project include the 300-node/2400-core Wheeler compute cluster, the 32-node Xena NVIDIA GPU cluster, and the Taos condo compute cluster. These systems host a wide range of software packages for use by the diverse community of UNM researchers, including traditional scientific computing applications, state-of-the-art data analytics and machine learning systems, and interfaces such as Jupyter, R, and Parallel Matlab for new application domains in the long-tail of science. This allows CARC systems support the broad range of UNM research computing needs from single-node data analysis to capacity HPC to complex big data and scientific computing applications.  

In addition, CARC and UNM Libraries also host a VMWare/Cisco/Netapp virtual machine infrastructure that provides support for custom research applications and data storage/management. CARC PIs augment this system with the compute, storage, and software resources needed by their application, PI-focused IT personnel administer the deployed platform, and CARC and Libraries personnel manage the underlying infrastructure, including mirroring hosted VMs and storage to remote data centers when necessary. Development of institutional support for controlled unclassified research in this platform is also under development.

All of these systems are housed in CARC's dedicated research data center with 2 UPS systems and 3 Liebert AC systems; together they provide 270 kVa of UPS capacity and 70 tons of dedicated cooling, maintaining a time window for riding out transient power loss or cleanly shutting down systems in the event of longer outages. Systems in this data center are connected to campus by multiple 10G connections, including a dedicated 10G connection to UNM's Science DMZ research network. Wide-area Internet connectivity to UNM includes 100G connections to the DOE Energy Sciences Network (ESNet) and the Western Regional Network, both through the Albuquerque Gigapop.

A summary of CARC compute resources can be found in the table on the systems page.