This summer, OIT High Performance Computing (HPC) services will be replacing the old IBM p575 shared memory parallel servers with new IBM LS42 blade servers. This is good news for NC State researchers and graduate students whose work require shared memory parallel computations. It is also good news for the budget, since the new computers with significantly increased shared memory capacities will cost less than paying for the maintenance on the old system.

Each of the four new LS42 servers has four AMD Opteron quad-core processors for a total of 16 cores per blade. Three blades each have 64 gigabytes (Gbytes) of shared memory, and the fourth has 128 Gbytes. These new servers have twice as many processors and up to four times as much memory as the p575 servers that are being replaced. They will support advanced research such as work using the Gaussian computational chemistry package.

OIT HPC offers several short courses a year on how to use the HPC resources. A short course is also planned on using Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) programming to enable shared memory computing. For more information, visit NC State OIT HPC resources online.