Core Research Computing Facility
Columbia's centrally managed High Performance Computing (HPC) resource on the Morningside campus, called Hotfoot, is housed in the Core Research Computing Facility (CRCF)*, which consists of a dedicated portion of Columbia's 5000 square foot data center. A project to upgrade the electrical infrastructure of the university data center is currently underway.
In addition, ongoing green data center initiatives**--involving energy-use measurement and monitoring, server consolidation and the purchase of high density computing equipment--focus on maximizing computing capacity (i.e number of computer operations and amount of data storage) per watt, thereby increasing energy efficiency. These efforts will help Columbia to meet its local and national commitments to reduce the university's carbon footprint.
*The Core Research Computing Facility project is supported by NIH Research Facility Improvement Grant 1G20RR030893-01, awarded April 15, 2010.
**Green data center initiatives are supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) Cost-Sharing Agreement No. ST11145-1, awarded April 1, 2009 in response to NYSERDA Program Opportunity Notice (PON) 1206, Data Center and Server Efficiency.
Hotfoot Shared HPC Cluster
Hotfoot is a shared HPC cluster created under a partnership among: the departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Statistics, and Economics plus other groups represented in the Social Science Computing Committee (SSCC); Columbia University Information Technology (CUIT); the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research; and the School of Arts & Sciences.
The cluster runs the Torque/Moab resource manager/scheduler software and consists of 62 execute servers which provide 616 cores for running jobs. The system also includes a 51 terabyte array of working storage, shared between the departments and used by researchers for the temporary storage of their input data sets and job results.
Researchers currently using Hotfoot submit data analysis jobs using applications and languages including Matlab, R, Java, and C++. The system also supports Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallel programming.
Research Computing Services (RCS) is involved with configuring the scheduler, supporting users of the cluster and, working with many other groups, helping to coordinate CUIT's HPC Cluster service.
Xsede HPC Access
All Columbia faculty members and postdoctoral researchers who are eligible principal investigators (PIs) can contact RCS to inquire about joining our Xsede allocation. After joining, PIs can request that Columbia graduate or undergraduate students also be given accounts under the allocation. See http://www.xsede.org/ for more information.
