AMD ROME CALCULATION NODES FOR COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY

In early July, SIE installed new nodes for the Computational Chemistry cluster at the University of Barcelona. This supply had been won in a contest of almost 360,000 euros.

Through 26 SIE Ladon nodes, based on Gigabyte platforms and AMD Rome processors, a total of 1,664 2.9 Ghz cores and 26 TB of RAM are offered to the customer for scientific calculation. The nodes are integrated through a 10G network, connected to fiber with the outside world and a gigabit network for IPMI communications, through DLINK switches, which allows remote control of the machines with KVM over LAN and through the free GSM application (Gigabyte Server Management).

The Institute of Computational Chemistry is specialized in various fields of theoretical and computational chemistry. The research activity carried out at the IQTCUB covers the development of computational methods and tools, the application of various techniques of electronic structures and simulation to problems in materials science, the study of reactivity and reaction dynamics in chemical reactions, as well as biological systems and soft matter.

According to the administrator Jordi Inglés, more than 100 researchers work with the HPC system at the center with a global computing power of almost 4000 cores and 37TB of RAM. Now by adding the new SIE cluster we have considerably increased the computing power of the center.

Currently the institute is expanding thanks to the award-winning María de Maeztu award, opening the institute to various fields of research from molecular dynamics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, design and printing of molecular structures in 3D and applications designed in virtual environments so that researchers manage and interact in a 3D environment with Oculus virtual reality glasses.