When possible, we would greatly appreciate an acknowledgement of ACCRE in presentations and publications. Here is our suggested text (also available as an RTF document):
We also attempt to maintain on this website an up-do-date list of publications based on your research using ACCRE that results in journal articles or conference proceedings.
We are glad to assist you with the development of proposals that include the use of ACCRE resources. We will also provide a letter in support of the portion of your research and educational programs which use the facility. Please do not hesitate to contact ACCRE Administration for any such assistance, including budgetary concerns.
For your convenience, a general description of ACCRE facilities is available below and as an RTF document. Please feel free to use any or all of the included text. For more technical detail, see the services pages and this FAQ.
The Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) is a collaboratory built by and for Vanderbilt faculty. ACCRE offers computing resources flexible enough to enable High Performance Computing applications in a wide variety of research and education areas. Researchers from thirty campus departments and four schools use ACCRE for their computation needs.
All ACCRE hardware resources are housed in the University's secure data center. In addition to the High Performance Computing system (described in detail below), ACCRE has multiple terabytes of disk space and a robotic tape storage system. Vanderbilt University is an Internet2 member and is a founding participant in Southern Crossroads (SoX) in Atlanta which provides access to a large number of research and high performance networks. Vanderbilt has a 10 Gigabits per second external network connection.
The ACCRE High Performance Computing cluster has over 2,000 processor cores and has a theoretical peak performance of 12 TeraFLOPS. Approximately 70% of the processors are x86-based AMD Opterons with clock speed at 1.8 GHz, 2.0 GHz and 2.4 GHz. The other 30% are IBM JS20 2.2 GHz PowerPC blades. All processors run a 64-bit Linux OS. Each compute node/blade has 1.5−32 GB of memory. Compute nodes all have a disk drive (ranging from 40 – 250 GB) and dual copper gigabit Ethernet ports. Over 25% of the systems also have low latency high bandwidth Myrinet interconnects. Each node is monitored via Nagios. Resource management, scheduling of jobs, and usage tracking are handled by an integrated scheduling system by Moab/Torque. These utilities include an "advance reservation" system that allows a block of nodes to be reserved for pre-specified periods of time (e.g., a class or lab session) for educational or research purposes.
IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) is used for user home directories and scratch space and can sustain 10 Gb/s to the cluster. The home directories of all users are backed up daily. The internal network design is a classic tree with a Foundry BigIron RX-16 switch at the root providing 1.54 Tb/s of available bandwidth (3.84 Tb/s total switch capacity) to the cluster. All of the disk servers and management nodes are connected to the top level.
The daily operation and maintenance of ACCRE is provided by ten support personnel, including eight system administrators, programmers and researchers with a combination of more than 60 years of computing experience. Support for system services is provided on a 24/7/365 basis, with on-call pager based support on nights and weekends. Cluster uptime has been better than 95% over the past three years. Support, training and education are available for all members of the ACCRE community – from novice to expert.
