The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in

Minneapolis, Minnesota Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origins ...

is a core research facility of the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

that provides hardware and software resources, as well as technical user support, to faculty and researchers at the university and at other institutions of higher education in Minnesota. MSI is located in

Walter Library Walter Library is an academic library located on the East Bank campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It currently houses the College of Science and Engineering Library and Dean's Office, the Digital Technology and Digita ...

, on the university's

Twin Cities Twin cities are a special case of two neighboring cities or urban centres that grow into a single conurbation – or narrowly separated urban areas – over time. There are no formal criteria, but twin cities are generally comparable in statu ...

campus.

History

In 1981, the University of Minnesota became the first U.S. university to acquire a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

, a

Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...

. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community. MSI currently has three HPC systems available for use. MSI is part of Research Computing in the Office of the Vice President for Research. Research Computing is an umbrella organization that comprises the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute, and U-Spatial.

Memberships

MSI is a member of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, the Minnesota High Tech Association, the Great Lakes Consortium, and the

Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

(XSEDE).

Mission

The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute seeks to provide researchers at the University of Minnesota and at other institutions of higher education in the state of Minnesota access to high-performance computing resources and user support to facilitate successful and cutting-edge research in all disciplines, help researchers attract funding, contribute to undergraduate and graduate education, and benefit the broader community. MSI is committed to expanding and developing the types of service it offers in order to continue to play its key support role across the growing spectrum of scientific fields. MSI is also committed to facilitating University-industry collaboration and to promoting technology transfer through the interchange of ideas in the field of supercomputing research, including the dissemination of results of research accomplished with MSI resources.

Supercomputing capabilities

HPC resources

Agate - HPE cluster with HPE and AMD CPU nodes and NVidia GPU nodes Mangi - Heterogeneous HPE cluster; AMD processors tightly integrated via high-speed Infiniband network Mesabi - HPE Linux distributed cluster; Intel processor tightly integrated via very high-speed communication network
MSI HPE overview

Laboratories

LCSE-MSI Visualization Laboratory
(LMVL)
Scientific Development and Visualization
(SDVL)

References

* Moore, Rick. "Blade Runner : UMNews." University of Minnesota. Web. 29 July 2010. http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_148391.html * Vance, Ashlee. "Minnesota’s Enormous Apples Computer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com." Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com. Web. 29 July 2010. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/minnesotas-enormous-apples-computer/?smid=pl-share

External links

Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

University of Minnesota
{{DEFAULTSORT:University Of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute University of Minnesota Supercomputers University and college laboratories in the United States Computer science institutes in the United States Research institutes in Minnesota