Research Computing Services manages the Shared Computing Cluster (SCC), a heterogeneous Linux cluster for the Boston University research community.

The SCC is composed of both shared (completely subsidized by the University and available to all researchers at no cost) and buy-in (researcher owned with priority access) compute nodes and storage components accommodating a wide range of researchers’ requirements and resources. The Storage-as-a-Service program is available for “renting” storage.

Over twelve petabytes of storage for research data are available in several configurations. All of it uses hardware RAID to protect against data loss due to disk drive failures and Snapshots to recover files that may have been accidentally deleted. A storage service called STASH provides an inexpensive means of maintaining a second copy of data off-site. Additionally, a limited amount of space which is automatically backed up an off-site location is provided for disaster recovery. All of the above configurations are offered with an option to conform to dbGaP requirements.

A wide range of programming languages, parallelizing compilers, mathematical and scientific libraries, graphics and visualization software, and discipline-specific software packages is maintained on the Cluster. Many help pages on this software are written specifically for getting started on the SCC.

Consulting and Training are available for the full range of Researchers’ needs, from getting started to maximizing performance on the SCC.

The SCC is located at the LEED Platinum certified Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, Massachusetts. There it utilizes the abundant, clean, renewable energy from Holyoke Gas & Electric’s hydroelectric power plant on the Connecticut River. The MGHPCC has a 33,000-square-foot computer room and a 19MW power feed.

Access to the SCC is via the campus and region’s high-performance networking. The campus core utilizes 10-Gigabit Ethernet with multiple 10-Gigabit links to the Boston/Cambridge NoX node and two pairs of 10-Gigabit connections to the MGHPCC.