Physics Research Computer Facility

An extensive network of computational facilities supports the research activities of the Department. There are networked multiprocessor DELL and SGI servers and centralized Sun workstations available to departmental faculty, staff, and students. Additional Unix and Linux servers and workstations, as well as many Windows PC's, are available to research groups.

For computationally intensive applications, students have access to supercomputing resources supported through the Center for Computational Science and the Office of Information Technology. At the high end, these currently consist of an IBM BlueGene system with 1024 dual-processor compute nodes and an aggregate peak performance of 5.7 Tflops, IBM p690 servers with 112 processors and a peak capacity of about 600 Gflops, and IBM p655 server with 48 processors and a peak capacity of about 200 Gflops, as well as an IBM Linux cluster with 52 two processor compute nodes and 24 display nodes.

The Departmental Computer Facility supports a wide range of software applications for physics data collection, analysis, simulation and visualization.

The Computer Research Facility staff is supervised by the Physics Computer Committee. Users are subject to the Boston University Information Technology Ethics/Usage policy.