---
title: "CARC launches new condo cluster"
description: "The UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) announces the launch of a new condo cluster."
type: News
tags:
  - News
date: "2022"
generated:
  by: "process:scripts/port_legacy_pages.py"
  at: "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: carc-web
    resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/news--events/News/carc-launches-hopper.html"
    title: "CARC launches new condo cluster (carc.unm.edu)"
    author: "team:unm-carc"
---

# CARC launches new condo cluster

<p class="carc-byline">2022</p>

The UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) announces the launch of
a new condo cluster. The cluster, named Hopper, will provide general compute
resources to the UNM community and also includes hardware funded by individual
UNM researchers to meet support their sponsored research efforts.

The Office of the Vice President for Research funded a number of nodes in
Hopper in support of CARC’s core mission of providing computational resources
to support UNM goals as a research institution. These nodes are available for
the UNM computational research community to use, free of charge. The Hopper
cluster consists of 53 compute nodes with a combined 1,760 Intel Xeon Gold
CPUs and 8.2 TB of RAM.

UNM’s Vice President for Research, Ellen Fisher, noted that “continuing to
invest in CARC is vital to UNM’s research and education missions. CARC serves
as the hub of computational research and education at UNM and has been
successful in implementing the “one university” framework in collaborating
with Main Campus’ and Health Sciences’ researchers and students to create and
translate new knowledge. This new condo cluster expands CARC’s capacity to
provide access to high-end computing resources and associated infrastructure,
offer specialized expertise, coordinate and collaborate with other UNM
programs across all UNM campuses, and grow the collaborative user community
through education and outreach.”

Researchers are also able to purchase individual nodes in Hopper, which gives
them priority access to their own nodes at all times. A major benefit of the
condo model is that researchers are able to utilize other researchers’ nodes
in the system when those nodes are not in use. This allows researchers to take
full advantage of Hopper’s computing power, assures resources aren’t sitting
idle, and reduces wait times to run jobs.

Computer Science Professor Melanie Moses is one of the researchers who
purchased a node in Hopper. “The Hopper cluster will allow us to scale up our
SIMCoV model to simulate viral spread and immune response through the 500
billion cells of the human lung. This unprecedented scale will show how much
damage viruses and immune responses can cause to lung over the course of an
infection,” Moses stated.

![](/assets/hopper-launch-grace-hopper.jpg)

Hopper is named after Navy Rear Admiral [Grace
Hopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper){target=_blank}, a
mathematician and computer scientist. Hopper was a pioneer in computer
programming, [creating the first programming
language](https://president.yale.edu/biography-grace-murray-hopper){target=_blank}
that allowed programmers to write code in words rather than symbols. She
accomplished this through creating a compiler, a program that translates the
words programmers use into symbol-based machine code a computer can
understand. This work became the basis for COBOL, a programming language still
widely used today.

CARC Associate Director Ylva Pihlström explained that "CARC supports the UNM
Campus with research computing hardware and support, and with Hopper we will
be able to offer faculty and student researchers expanded computing resources.
The new cluster will help boost research and scholarship across campus for
both individual and collaborative research projects, and the plan is to
continue adding nodes to the Hopper cluster in the future."

Hopper is available now, both to researchers who purchased nodes and to the
rest of the UNM research community. Researchers interested in buying nodes in
Hopper or the next condo cluster through [CARC’s internal service
center](../research/premium-services.md) can [contact
us](mailto:unitadmin@carc.unm.edu) via email for more information.

*Photo of Grace Hopper courtesy of the United States Navy, ID DN-SC-84-05971.*