Aeolus is a high-performance computing cluster (HPC) designed and operated to support the specialized computing needs of researchers in the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture (VCEA). Aeolus is a heterogeneous cluster housed in a temperature-controlled server room and provided with isolated electrical power. As of Jan 2018 the Aeolus cluster has 20 compute nodes, totaling 1200 processors and 3.06 TB of RAM. All homogenous nodes are connected in parallel via Fat Tree non-blocking Mellanox 40Gb/s QDR Infiniband and are clustered to other (Intel or AMD) nodes at a blocking ratio of 2:1. Disk storage, in multiple performance/use tiers, totals over 800 TBytes. Running CentOS Linux, Aeolus accommodates openmpi, mpich, mpich2, R, Python, C and FORTRAN parallel compilers, offers various command shells, and supports parallel computation. Aeolus is connected at 10 Gigabit per second to the campus backbone and is fitted to accommodate WSU’s High Speed Scalable Research Network at 40 Gigabit per second.
Washington State University maintains several High Performance Computing Environments. While the university is making major investments into Kamiak, a homogenous HPC, Aeolus exists as a computational resource focused on providing researchers with a cost-effective environment to meet their specialized computing needs. Aeolus is managed by the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture and is supported by the investments of research grants.
Named after the Greek god of wind, Aeolus was founded by the Laboratory for Atmospheric Research and is one of the oldest computational resources on campus. With over 10 years of operation, Aeolus remains a relevant computing resource for over 150 users from a diverse research landscape, spanning the entire WSU campus.
