Facilities description for inclusion in proposals

The John C. Slater Computing and Visualization Laboratory provides computing and networking services to QTP and its immediate collaborators. The central server consists of a redundant pair of servers that function as backup for each other in case of maintenance or hardware failure. They are Sun Fire V490 servers with 4 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC III+ CPUs, 8 GB of RAM and a 770 GB RAID 5 diskarray for home directories and 30 TB on several RAID 5 disk arrays for scratch space. The home directories are backed up daily to an alternate storage server. The network connecting all servers is Gigabit Ethernet. The networks also have shared printers for color printing and large 4 ft by 6 ft poster production.

High-performance development and production computing is performed on a grid of Linux clusters with over 400 cores. Some are Xeon IA32, some Xeon EM64T, and some AMD Opteron. These clusters are connected by Gigabit Ethernet and are managed by the Moab Scheduler and Torque resource management system.

In addition, QTP is an active partner in the UF campus wide HPC Center. This provides access to a 2,500 core cluster with InfiniBand with 120 TB of parallel file system.

The Laboratory charges only for recovery of operating costs; acquisition is funded by a combination of University support, external grants, and industry support. The charges are very low; details are at http://www.qtp.ufl.edu/slaterlab.

Charges description for inclusion in some proposals

The laboratory charges for usage to recover the cost of operating the equipment. The charges are comparatively low because no equipment acquisition is included. Charges are $1.00 per Peta (10**15) floating point operations performed. This translates to a certain cost per hour of computing depending on the speed and number of the processors used. $1.50 per GB per day for permanent file storage (scratch storage is free); $.15 per standard color page, $.25 per high quality color page, $1.00 per printed color transparency, $20.00 per 4x6 ft plot.