Scientific Computing

An array of powerful computing resources are available at Boston University, and at the Medical Campus in particular.

Scientific Computing & Visualization (IS&T)

The Scientific Computing and Visualization (SCV) group within Information Services & Technology at Boston University provides specialized computing and communication resources in support of computational science and engineering, scientific visualization, computer graphics, and other disciplines that require high-performance computing or complex visualization. SCV manages these resources in close collaboration with the University’s Center for Computational Science. The supercomputing facilities provided by the group include a 1024-node IBM Blue Gene system, a collection of IBM pSeries 655 shared-memory systems, and Intel and AMD based Linux clusters. The group also manages the Computer Graphics Laboratory and the high-resolution, tiled, stereoscopic Deep Vision Display Wall. A more detailed description of the computing facilities and visualization capabilities is available.

Proteomics Core Laboratory

The Proteomics Core Laboratory computing resources include:

  • A high performance computer cluster (LANdiagram) for high-intensity bioinformatics processing, consisting of two 4-way data processing computers and a redundant data storage array server. The 4-way data processors each utilize four AMD Opteron 880 processors (2.4 GHz), 32 GB RAM, dual gigabit data ports, with 2 TB of local disk space in a RAID 5 single parity configuration and a separate 400 GB RAID 1 mirrored array for the operating system and applications. The redundant data storage array server utilizes two AMD Opteron 2216 processors (2.4 GHz), 4 GB RAM, dual gigabit data ports, with 4 TB of local disk space in a RAID 6 double parity configuration and a separate 40 GB RAID 1 mirrored array for its operating system.
  • Global computer network comprising 17 workstations for secure online and offline data processing and analysis. The workstations are located in laboratories and in a dedicated data processing room, linked by the network described above