CARC History

1993  Professors Frank Gilfeather, Brian Smith, and John Sobolewski establish the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) in Kihei, HI, in support of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization program.

1994  The Albuquerque Resource Center, later renamed the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), is established in the Galles Motor Company building on historic Route 66, along with the High Performance Computing Education and Research Center (HPCERC), an umbrella organization spanning MHPCC and AHPCC.

1996  National Science Foundation (NSF) Chautauqua meeting hosted at University of New Mexico (UNM) by AHPCC.

1999  Roadrunner, the first Linux cluster available via NSF national allocation, is installed. Roadrunner is integrated by a small company in Sandy, UT (Alta Tech, subsequently known as Linux Networx).

1999  The Access Grid (AG) Internet teleconferencing system is installed at UNM and the first-ever AG session is hosted by UNM.

2000  Los Lobos supercluster, comprising 512 processors with Myrinet commodity fast interconnect, is installed at UNM. This is the first-ever Linux production system built by IBM. During the inauguration, IBM announces their Linux strategy for future product offerings. Los Lobos becomes the highest-ranked open Linux cluster in the world in the subsequent Top 500 list (narrowly edging out the Sandia National Laboratories [SNL] Cplant cluster). The ranking of Los Lobos places UNM among the top five universities in the world in campus compute power. Los Lobos is made available to national users through the NSF National Computational Science Alliance, an early predecessor of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) of NSF supercomputer centers.

2000  Vista Azul coupled compute/visualization system deployed under an IBM Shared University Research (SUR) award (Principle Investigator [PI] Professor Brian Smith, Computer Science).

2003  Professor Marc Ingber (Mechanical Engineering) is named Director; Center is renamed HPC@UNM.

2003  UNM Cancer Center GenomeDW genomics data warehouse is designed and deployed on the CARC Delphi parallel Oracle server.

2004  Professor Barney Maccabe (Computer Science) named Director; Dr. Tim Thomas (Physics and Astronomy) is named Deputy Director.

2005  Dedication of a new, state-of-the-art, 1,500 square-foot machine room. Extensive Galles Building renovation to construct machine room also provides new office and studio space for the ARTS (Art, Research, Technology, and Science) Lab.

2007  Professor Tom Caudell (Electrical and Computer Engineering) is named Director.

2009  Professor Susan R. Atlas (Physics and Astronomy) is named Director; Center is renamed UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing.

2010  Professor Andrea Polli (CARC Associate and Social Media Workgroup [SMW] Director, Interdisciplinary Film & Digital Media Program) and students take advantage of the 25-foot ceilings in CARC's location in the historic Galles Building to construct the e-Oculus public media-commissioned installation on-site. The piece debuts at the Knowledge Representation & Discovery event in conjunction with the commission of the Research Storage Consortium (RSC) storage system at the Center. The e-Oculus work is now on permanent display at the University of Utah Eccles School of Business.

2010  The UNM RSC, including four NSF-funded Projects and Centers (DataONE, Long-Term Ecological Research, Earth Data Analysis Center, and CARC) and University Libraries, purchases and installs 281 TB (RAID5 usable) Hewlett-Packard (HP) X9000 research storage system. At the time of its deployment, the RSC system is the most densely-populated HP storage system in the world.

2011  Supercomputing '11 coupled media demonstration links video (Professor Jack Ox, Music) and voice (Professor Kristen Loree, Theater and Dance) in performance of Kurt Schwitter's Ursonate across 1,568 miles between Albuquerque and Seattle, over the National Lambda Rail.

2011  CARC Gallery opening debuts with the CARC Gallery Exhibition Spring 2011, which presented three graduate students whose work represents the variety of interdisciplinary and multimedia approaches of students who study with SMW Director Andrea Polli.

2012  Metropolis repurposed Los Alamos National Laboratory  (LANL) supercomputer donated to CARC by the New Mexico Consortium, under the auspices of the NSF-supported PRObE project.

2013  Commissioning of 200-node "green" Galles Beowulf cluster and Hadoop subsystem.

2013  Supercomputing '13 BD2K (Big Data to Knowledge) video showcases data-intensive research by nine faculty and researchers at UNM as they discuss the complexities and challenges involved in the process of translating very large datasets into new discoveries and understanding.

2014  Ulam repurposed LANL supercomputer donated to CARC by the New Mexico Consortium, under the auspices of the NSF-supported PRObE project, bringing CARC aggregate core count to 2,200; 15 TFlops peak.

2014  Dedicated Science DMZ 10 Gbps cross-campus network connection is established with support from UNM Information Technology, linking UNM Cancer Center high-throughput genomic sequencer with RSC storage system.

2015  Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) volunteers, through a grant awarded to the UNM SMW led by Professor Andrea Polli, join CARC staff to work on specific projects that will continue to build capacity for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEAM) in New Mexico.

2016  CARC and the University of New Mexico host the 28th Annual Workshop on Recent Developments in Electronic Structure Methods.

2016  Professor Patrick Bridges (Computer Science) is named Interim Director.

2017 A new computing system is donated to CARC by LANL. The new system is nine times more powerful than the combined computing power of the four machines it replaces.

2018 Patrick Bridges is named CARC Director.

2019 The Galles general use supercomputer was retired. Galles was built from over 200 used Dell desktop computers acquired from all over campus, in collaboration with IT and University Libraries. Galles was an important resource for supporting campus research computing needs for many years, but was increasingly difficult to maintain and most Galles users were migrated to newer CARC systems.

2021 The CREATE system ran at CARC for 17 successful years. NASA has now instituted a similar program called LANCE. Professor Louis Scuderi, using a congressional appropriation, developed CREATE in 2004 to disseminate satellite data to researchers and public entities. The system has been used to monitor forest fires, track severe weather patterns, and study vegetation changes.