High Performance Computing Cluster

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No. CNS-1228291.

Project PI: Dr. K. Majumdar (Physics), Co-PI: Drs. M. Krcmar (Physics), A. Szarecka (CMB), and D. Furton (Physics).

Cluster In-Charge: Dr. Doug Furton.

Cluster Details:

  • Dell/RHEL/Rocks+ Cluster. Runs at 3.0 TFLOPS (measured against the HPLinpack benchmark).
  • Operating system: RHEL Server 6.2 with StackIQ Rocks+ 6.0.1 cluster management software and Sun Grid Engine (SGE) job scheduler.
  • Head node: Dell PowerEdge R720 with dual E5-2620 2.0GHz, 15M Cache, hex-core CPUs, 64GB RAM and 4TB disk (RAID 5).
  • Compute nodes (16): Dell PowerEdge R420 with dual E5-2430 2.2GHz, 15M Cache, hex-core CPUs, 24GB Ram and 500MB disk.
  • Connectivity: Dell 5524 GbE and Intel True Scale Fabric InfiniBand Switch 12300-BS18.
  • GCC version 4.4.6 20110731 (Red Hat 4.4.6-3) and Python 2.6.6 installed.
  • Linux workstation with Intel Core i5 2500 CPU, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, and EVGA/NVIDIA GTX Titan Z GPU with 12 GB RAM and 5760 CUDA cores. Compilers: gcc and NVIDIA CUDA.
Front View of Cluster
Back View of Cluster

Education and Research:

  • Frustrated quantum spin systems.
  • First principle density functional calculations.
  • Molecular biology simulations.

Master’s thesis.

  • James R. LaFleur (Mentor: Dr. A. Szarecka), “Computational Modeling of β5-β6 Carbapenemase Loop in Wild Type and Selected Mutants of OXA-24 Class D β-Lactamase”, defended March 2015.

Presentations (2013 - Present):

  1. Amy Mohr, First-principle calculations of elastic properties of crystalline solids, physics capstone project, Grand Valley State University (GVSU) 2013-2014. Work also presented as a poster during GVSU Student Scholars Days in April 2014.
  2. Rebekah Newman, S. Sridhar, R. Smart, W. Schroeder, A. Szarecka. “Towards understanding the Mechanism of Non-Competitive Inhibition of Telomerase”. West Michigan Undergraduate Research Conference, Van Andel Institute, Grand Rapids, MI, Nov 2014
  3. Katie Chernoby, S. Sridhar, B. Schroeder, R. Smart, A. Szarecka "Mechanism of Telomerase Inhibition by Novel Non-nucleosidic Drug Candidates: Application of a Genetic Algorithm to Improve the Accuracy of Ligand Docking Simulations," Student Scholarship Day, GVSU, Apr 2014.

Publications (2013 - Present):

  1. Kingshuk Majumdar and  S. D. Mahanti, "Quantum Spin Fluctuations and magnons in antiferromagnetically coupled bilayers with tuneable intra-bilayer exchange - the case of Cr_2W(Te)O_6," (arXiv:1509.0010v1) (2015).
  2. M. Krcmar and J. R. Morris, "A comparative first-principles study of martensitic phase transformations in TiPd2 and TiPd intermetallics," J. Phys.: Condensed Matter, 26, 135401, 2014.
  3. M. Krcmar and C. L. Fu, "Effect of lattice anharmonicity in the structural phase transformation of Laves phase HfV2 alloy: A first-principles investigation," Acta Materialia, 61, Issue 19, Pages 7473-7480, 2013.
  4. G.S. Uhrig and Kingshuk Majumdar, "Varied Perturbation Theory for the Dispersion Dip in the Two-Dimensional Heisenberg Quantum Antiferromagnet," Eur. Phys. J. B 86: 282, 2013.


Page last modified October 26, 2017