High-Performance Computing Cluster Coming To Texas State

SAN MARCOS – The Texas State University System Board of Regents has authorized Texas State University to purchase a next-generation, high-performance computing cluster.

The board approved the purchase during its August 18 meeting in Austin.

The Learning, Exploration, Analysis and Processing computing cluster, or LEAP, will be ready for use on campus later this year.

LEAP represents a significant advancement in university computing capabilities, further enabling a broad and growing research community. LEAP has a node count roughly four times its predecessor, STAR, and nearly six times the number of processors. LEAP’s theoretical computing capacity is 14 times that of STAR at 135 TFlops (135 trillion floating point operations per second). Combined with LEAP’s introduction of a new high-speed parallel file system and high-speed interconnect, this resource represents a true advancement in computing capabilities for Texas State researchers.

“The new cluster will enhance the diverse research agenda at Texas State University, helping researchers with everything from analyzing fish habitats to statistical genetics and bioinformatics,” said Vice President for Information Technology Ken Pierce.

Furthering Science and Research

LEAP is designed to provide cyber infrastructure covering a diverse application base with complex workflows. The system is designed to support capacity computing, optimized for quick turnaround on small- and modest-scale jobs while still providing plenty of resources for jobs that scale.

Local solid state drives (SSD) on each computing node will be beneficial to applications that exhibit random access data patterns or require fast access to significant amounts of computing node local scratch space. The large memory per node makes LEAP ideal for shared-memory applications.