University of Mississippi High Energy Physics Parallel Computing Center

Original DECstation Computing Farm: DECstation farm

Grid Computing Farm: Linux farm

Current UMiss Grid Computing "Farm" (2005-Present)

The Grid Computing Center here at the University of Mississippi is a high performance computing facility established for high energy physics research. This facility is a proud member of DOSAR, currently involved in data processing and simulation for the DØ experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Lab (FNAL) in Chicago.

Our current hardware includes:

4 Dual 12-core 2.1 GHz AMD Opteron 1U Grid Nodes
24 Dual 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron 1U Grid Nodes
3 Dual 1.6 GHz AMD Opteron 4U Administrative Nodes
1 Dual 2.4 GHz AMD Opteron 5U 8TB Storage Server

We have full gigabit connectivity with a 10 gbit backbone locally and 1 gbit fiber to the University of Mississippi backbone.

Our Internet2 connection is currently a GbE, 1 gigabit pipe.

Original UMiss 2800 MIP Data Reconstruction "Farm" (1991-2005)

The 2800 MIP "farm" was divided into four separate "farms" (Charm, Higgs, Sigma, and Omega) each with its own server and approximately 3.5 GB scratch disk plus server disk. There was one full-time system manager. It was accessible via Internet (@higgs1.phy.olemiss.edu).

66 DECstation 5000s
49 older (1 year) MIPS R3000 CPUs
17 newer MIPS 50 MHz R4000 CPUs
36 Exabyte 8200 Tape Drives
4 Tape Autoloaders (10 tape capacity each)
25 GB Total Disk Capacity
$400K Approximate Cost for Hardware/Software
UMiss VAXstation 4000, which served as our primary mail node and VMS platform. It is accessible via Internet (@umsphy.phy.olemiss.edu) and BITNET (@umsphy).

Reconfigured in 1997:

UMiss Data Filtering "Farm"

The Filtering "farm" was divided into two separate "farms" (Sigma and Omega) each with its own server and two 6 GB scratch disks each divided into 3 2-GB partitions.

16 DECstation 5000s
14 newer MIPS 50 MHz R4000 CPUs - 1 server + 6 filtering nodes per "Farm"
2 older (1 year) MIPS R3000 CPUs used as disk servers
12 Exabyte 8200 Tape Drives
2 Exabyte 8700LT Tape Drives
24 GB Total Disk Capacity

UMiss Monte Carlo Simulation "Farm"

The Monte Carlo "farm" was divided into two separate "farms" (Charm and Higgs) each with its own server and one 6 GB scratch disks, divided into 3 2-GB partitions.

14 DECstation 5000s
2 newer MIPS 50 MHz R4000 CPUs as servers, 1 per "Farm"
12 older (1 year) MIPS R3000 CPUs - 1 disk server + 5 Monte Carlo nodes per "Farm"
2 Exabyte 8205 Tape Drives
12 GB Total Disk Capacity