High Performance Computing

Swarthmore ITS provides access to high-performance computing systems for computationally intensive projects. Several different types of systems are available for faculty, staff, and students.  Academic Technologists from ITS will work with you to determine which resource best match your project.

Firebird Computing Cluster

Campus researchers have access to Firebird, Swarthmore's high-performance computer cluster.  Learn more about the system on the Firebird Computer Cluster page.

Jobs are submitted through the Slurm job scheduling system.

National and Regional Supercomputing Resources

Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) is an NSF-funded consortium which supports a network of shared supercomputing resources housed at major U.S. research institutions. Through ACCESS, member institutions gain access to flexible pools of time on large supercomputers. Using these systems, researchers are able to complete computational processes in one hour that would take a single desktop computer decades to complete.  Since joining in 2010, Swarthmore faculty and students from biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, and statistics made use of over several million processor-hours on supercomputing facilities around the United States. 

Systems available on ACCESS include:

• JetStream2, a cloud-based virtual machine service hosted by Indiana University that can provide a variety of systems including large memory and GPU instances for researchers and classes.

• Open Science Pool (OSPool), consisting of a network of more than 60,000 computers available to run serial jobs with a short queue time.

• Stampede3, a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center with 1,858 compute (more than 140,000 cores), over 330 terabytes of RAM, 13 petabytes of storage, and almost 10 petaflops of peak capability.

Swarthmore faculty and students have used ACCESS (and its precursors) for calculations of chemical structures, plasma physics simulations, and development of new computer science algorithms.

To learn more about ACCESS or get a ACCESS account, contact Jason Simms (jsimms1) in ITS.

High Throughput Computing Resources

If you have a large job that can be broken down into small, independent pieces, high throughput computing (HTC) may be a way to reduce the time needed for your calculation.  Instead of running a program on one large computer, you can create hundreds or thousands of small jobs that are sent to Open Science Pool (OSPool), a set of thousands of computers across the country.  Anyone can create an account at OSG Connect and start submitting jobs using the HTCondor system.

To learn more about Open Science Grid contact Jason Simms (jsimms1) in ITS.

Local Resources

For special projects, Swarthmore ITS may be able provide access to the spare computer time in ITS classroom computers, servers, or on cloud-based services.  

Image and Video Processing

The ITS Media Center has a set of computers that can be used for video editing, image processing, and other computationally-intensive processes.