The W.M. Keck Computational Materials Science Laboratory, a research facility of the Princeton Materials Institute, is available for use by Princeton faculty and students, as well as external industrial or institutional users, under regulations set by the Management Committee. To help defray significant operational and maintenance costs, a fee based on processor use will be charged as determined by the Management Committee. Baseline charge for internal users is $0.30 per CPU per hour while external users are billed at market rates. Rates may be changed to reflect usage.

The Keck Computational Materials Science Laboratory consists of three machines: a 128 processor IBM SP Winterhawk-2 supercomputer with 64 GB of memory and two 64 processor SGI Origin 2000 SMP supercomputers with 32 GB and 16 GB of memory. These two Origin 2000 computers can be connected through a Cray MetaRouter to provide a single 128 processor supercomputer with 48 GB of memory.

The IBM SP system is a distributed memory system consisting of 32 nodes. Each node utilizes 4-way POWER3-II processors running at 375 MHz. Communication between nodes is over IBM's high speed switch capable of 150 MB/sec peak bandwidth. Each node can directly access 2 GB of memory.

The SGI Origin 2000 is a cache coherent non-uniform memory access (ccNUMA) multiprocessor machine. It uses the MIPS R12000 microprocessors clocked at 300 MHz with 8 MB of secondary cache per CPU. The Origin employs a distributed shared memory with cache coherence maintained via a directory based protocol. This provides for program scalability and ease of programming by removing the broadcast bottleneck in non-shared memory configurations and maintaining the globally addressable memory space.

Keck Computational Facility Management Committee

Jeremiah Ostriker, Provost and Professor of Astrophysics
Roberto Car, Professor of Chemistry
David Srolovitz, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Joseph Michels, Director for Research Initiatives

For more information, please contact Joseph Michels on (609) 258-1717 or jmichels@Princeton.EDU, additional technical details are available from the systems administrator, Bill Wichser (609) 258 - 1127 or bill@princeton.edu

Last change May-24-2001 wgw