Research Computing

The University’s High-Performance Computing Research Center, a 47,000-square-foot facility opened on the Forrestal campus in 2011, has vastly increased the scale on which scientists can perform computational research. Capable of analyzing data sets from disciplines as diverse as astrophysics and genetics, the HPCRC’s modern design provides impressive computing power at a small environmental cost.

Four large-scale science applications (VPIC, PPM, QMCPACK and SPECFEM3DGLOBE) have sustained performance of 1 petaflop or more on the Blue Waters supercomputer, and the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) run on Blue Waters is the largest WRF simulation ever documented. These applications are part of the NCSA Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Performance (SPP) suite and represent valid scientific workloads.