ASU Research Computing supports research by offering supercomputers, also known as a compute cluster, and other advanced computational resources to faculty, staff and students. These supercomputers are a special configuration of multiple machines, usually containing hundreds of compute nodes, thousands of central processing unit (CPU) cores, hundreds of discrete graphic processing units (GPUs), and other specialized hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These supercomputers advance research and acceleration to discovery by offering:

• Increased Compute Capacity

• More Processing Speed

• Modeling and Simulation

• Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Visualization

Open

A visualization of a protein found in chlorophyll. This visualization was produced by Yuval Mazor, School of Molecular Sciences, on the Agave supercomputer.

Supercomputers Available at ASU:

There are three supercomputers available at ASU:

1. The Sol supercomputer is the main supercomputer open to the ASU community. This is a multi-million dollar supercomputer personally funded by President Crow.

2. The Aloe supercomputer is a HIPAA-compliant supercomputer that is available for research dealing with restricted data.

3. The Phoenix supercomputer, formerly known as the Agave supercomputer.

How much does it cost?

The Sol and Phoenix supercomputers are free to ASU faculty, staff, students, and affiliates. Utilization and job scheduling rely on “Fairshare”, an algorithm to help equitably distribute compute resources to all users.

The Aloe supercomputer is a paid service under the KE Secure Cloud.

How is CPU-hour time calculated?

A program that runs on a single CPU core for one hour uses one (1) CPU-hour. If your program uses multiple CPUs, then it will use that multiple of CPU hours for each hour "on the clock." For example, a program that uses eight CPU cores that runs for one hour would have used eight CPU-hours.

What is maximum amount of CPU-hours I can use?

There is no maximum or cap on how many CPU-hours users can utilize. Users are welcome and encouraged to utilize the supercomputer as much as they need.

When do I know that I’m ready to use a supercomputer?

• You are unable to run your model or computations on your local machine.

• You are working with large amounts of data.

• You need to calculate multiple or complex computations quickly.

• You need to implement machine learning or similar methodologies for your research.