Facilities, Equipment, and Other Resources
University-wide Computing Resources
Computing Facilities
The University of Louisville’s central research-computing infrastructure became available in spring 2009. This
infrastructure includes multiple systems serving the research needs of the entire university, including a generalpurpose high-performance distributed-memory computation cluster, a high-memory SMP system, an informatics
data management system, a visualization server, and several general-purpose web and software servers.
The general-purpose compute cluster is composed of 312 IBM iDatplex nodes each equipped with two Intel
Xeon L5420 2.5GHz quad-core processors for a total of 2496 processor cores. Each node has 16 or 32 GB of
memory, and the node interconnects are a mixture of Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps) and InfiniBand (16 Gbps)
technology. The cluster is estimated to have a peak performance rating of 20+ TFLOPS.
The high-memory SMP system is an IBM p570 server with 16 IBM Power6 4.7GHz CPUs. It is equipped with
128 GB of memory, 8 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and a quarter Terabyte of local high-performance SAS disk space
for system file and scratch space. This SMP system also acts as a statistics server with several statistical packages
available.
The visualization server consists of one IBM xSeries x3755 visualization node. It is equipped with two AMD
8360 2.5GHz quad-core Opteron processors, 16 GB of memory, an nVidia Quadro FX5600 graphics adapter and a
quarter Terabyte of local high-performance SAS disk space for system file and scratch space.
The Informatics data management system has 20 TB of dedicated storage and is optimized for transaction
processing.
All research systems share 100 TB of data storage and archiving space using IBM's General Purpose File
System (GPFS). All of the systems are housed in the University's secure data center and are administered by a team
of specialized HPC system administrators supported by a team of research computing consultants with experience in
HPC software and database design, development and optimization.
Campus Networking
The University of Louisville’s campuses are served by an 8-gigabit campus backbone network comprised of
over 77 miles of fiber in a dual ring configuration. The network can provide 10Mbps, 100Mbps, and 1Gbps
Ethernet service for faculty and staff communications needs. The campus wireless network utilizes 54Mbps
(802.11g) technology and is widely available across the campuses, with access in scheduled classrooms and in
public areas of most buildings. In addition the University of Louisville is connected to the Internet2 node via
dedicated fiber and currently has access to 1 Gbps of bandwidth. Available Internet2 bandwidth will be upgraded to
two 10 Gbps links by 2010. The Internet2 connection gives the University of Louisville direct access to the national
research and education networks, and enables participation in national networking initiatives such as
caGRID/caBIG and the TeraGrid.
The University of Louisville is also a member of the Kentucky Regional Optical Network (KyRON). This
regional optical network is managed and operated through a consortium including the University of Louisville, the
University of Kentucky and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. Participating universities are
interconnected using 10Gbps optical links. The Kentucky RON will extend the capabilities of the Louisville
Internet2 node to the other participating universities throughout the state, and provide new opportunities for
collaboration with the other universities in the state.