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 two 380 GB RAID 5 disk arrays for scratch space. The home directories are backed up daily with a tape robot that holds 60 LTO2 tapes each capable of holding 200 GB in native mode. There are 50 Solaris desktop workstations with static IP addresses. There is a secure network for laptops and Windows and MacOS personal and staff computers. These can access the Internet through a firewall system using the NAT protocol. There are two Windows 2000 servers that can be accessed using the RDP protocol by the users of the Solaris workstations for easy access to Windows applications. The network connecting all servers is Gigabit Ethernet. The networks also have shared printers for color printing and large 4x6 foot plotting.

High-performance development and production computing is performed on a grid of Linux clusters with a total of 304 CPUs. Some are Xeon IA32, some Xeon EM64T, and some AMD Opteron. These clusters are connect by Gigabit Ethernet and are managed by the PBSPro batch management system. The clusters have about 5 TB of scratch disk in addition to local scratch disks on each node.

In addition, QTP is an active partner in the UF campus grid. This provides access to a 192 CPU IBM POWER3 SP system with a fast, 150 MB/s full duplex, switch which carries a fast parallel file system of 800 GB.

The Lab also has a major simulation and visualization facility consisting of 6 IBM RS/6000 42P model 270 workstations with 4 375 MHz POWER3 proessors, 3 GB of RAM, 38 GB of disk, a high 3d graphics card and 19'' monitor; and 3 IBM RS/6000 42P model 170 workstations with 1 375 MHz POWER3 CPU and 256 MB RAM, 18 GB disk, a 3d graphics card and 19'' monitor; and a Fakespace Immersadesk quasi-immersive virtual reality visualization system driven by a 4 CPU SGI Onyx 2000 with 8 GB RAM and 45 GB disk.

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 only 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.