Karst supercomputer
In this video, Dave Hancock describes Karst, Indiana University’s newest supercomputer cluster. Housed in the IU Data Center, Karst will help researchers secure federal grants to fund discoveries, create jobs in the state, and keep sensitive data safe from cybersecurity threats.
Karst is an important addition to IU’s scholarly cyberinfrastructure because it provides an effective solution for researchers who need their own cluster,” said Craig Stewart, IU associate dean of research technologies. “With Karst, IU researchers can purchase a subset of the system for their dedicated use, or participate in a community ‘condo’ model that will permit higher priority and access to additional resources. Researchers reap the benefits of having their equipment located in the Data Center, managed by UITS expert systems administrators, with 24/7 monitoring. Karst offers this hosting at a much greater scale than ever before to the IU community,” he said.
Karst’s system architecture is designed to deliver the advanced performance needed to accommodate high-end, data-intensive applications critical to scientific discovery and innovation. Karst is equipped with 256 compute nodes, plus 16 dedicated data nodes for separate handling of data-intensive operations. All nodes are IBM NeXtScale nx360 M4 servers, each equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 8-core processors. Each compute node has 32 GB of RAM and 250 GB of local disk storage. Each data node has 64 GB of RAM and 24 TB of local storage. All nodes are connected via 10-gigabit Ethernet to the IU Science DMZ.
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