Overview

The ASCC occupies 2000 sq. ft. of beautifully renovated space in the Dana Research Center at Northeastern University. Presently it is composed of two main servers: aries.ascc.neu.edu (DELL PowerEdge R815) and cygnus.ascc.neu.edu (DELL PowerEdge R810). For more details see the technical specifications. Peviously it was composed of two clusters: Stardec and Zeus. The STARDEC cluster contained 16 EV6.7 Alpha processors distributed equally among 4 boxes. Three of these four boxes had 4GB RAM each, while the fourth box had 16GB RAM to allow memory intensive simulations. A network of workstations and PCs provides an additional computational resource. The Zeus clusters contained 16-node HP rx2600 Itanium2 HP-UX cluster 32 Intel Itanium2 processors running at 1.5 GHz, worlds fastest single processor SPECFP performance at the time of purchase (September 2004). The Zeus system was administrated by the IS at Northeastern University.

History

In 1999, the Advanced Scientific Computing Center (ASCC) was established with $1.3 million of funding in a three-way partnership between NSF, DEC and Northeastern University. The ASCC has expanded and been upgraded since. In 2000, Compaq Computer Corporation donated $500K. In 2004, the Hewlett-Packard Corporation (HP) donated $350K. Since 2005, Northeastern University IT has provided resources (especially operation), administration and assistance for the ASCC. The mission of the ASCC is to provides specialized computing resources geared towards research and education in computational science and engineering at Northeastern University. The ASCC has impacted research in 20 major Departments, Centers and Institutes at Northeastern University involving several hundred projects by helping scientists expand, forge and initiate many new research collaborations within and outside Northeastern University and by strengthening the computational component of many proposals for external funding. The ASCC has been also used for training in scientific computation and visualization techniques, in particular for the GAANN (Graduate Assistantships in Areas of National Needs) Fellowship program from the Education Department. A total of 40 Ph. D. students in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Math were involved. The total funds amount was $1 million in direct costs for 5 years (2000-2005). The ASCC is member of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (www.casc.org) whose mission is to bring academic innovation in advanced computing and to accelerates U.S. competitiveness.