Scientific Computing Facilities
SBAI researchers perform scientific computations both using external High Performance Computing resources (e.g. at CINECA and ENEA-CRESCO) and in-house facilities.
A first in-house facilities is a Scientific Computing Laboratory, located at the ground floor of the building RM002. The laboratory activity started in 2012. The laboratory was originally equipped with two Server Sun Fire – X2100 M2 rack 1U–1AMD Opteronmodello1210 – DDR2–667 4Gb. More recently one Server SuperMicro rack 2U – Double Processor Intel Xeon E5620 – DDR3 1333Mhz 24Gb has been added. This server is equipped with the Scientific Linux release 6.10 (Carbon) system. In the past few years the laboratory has been mainly used as a support for the mathematics research lines, mainly as an instrument to run Monte Carlo simulation and to perform numerical studies of partial differential equations. The laboratory has been used not only by the researchers of the Department, but also by many PhD students of the PhD school Mathematical Models for Engineering, Electromagnetics and Nanosciences.
A computational infrastructure with a total of more than 250 cores and four servers for high performing computing (HPC) is hosted by the Laboratory of physics of semiconductors and nano-structures.
The Department has also designed and assembled a simulation server with four GPUs running in parallel for raytracing applications and for developing new-generation Monte-Carlo codes. Thanks to a closed-circuit liquid cooling system, the GPU cards can sustain continuous operation, since the temperature of the computing hardware is kept well below 45 Celsius. For the described applications, the server has a performance comparable to that of a conventional cluster of more than 1000 CPU computing nodes.
