We’ve all heard the old adage that two heads are better than one for solving a problem. The university’s high-performance and grid computing resources take that idea and multiply it to provide super-powered processing abilities.

A high-performance computing cluster is now available to research groups that require massive compute cycles. A committee approves research projects and assigns time allocations on the cluster. More information and a form for requesting a time allocation are available at www.oit.umd.edu/hpcc.

As reported in the Spring 2006 edition of ITforUM, OIT established an operational Condor-on-WAM pool and integrated it into the university grid infrastructure Lattice Project. Since then, OIT has been in the process of adding new resources and further developing the grid. This grid is currently composed of more than 1000 lab machines, desktop workstations, and servers all across campus, which can be used during their idle time to solve computational problems. This resource will soon be more widely available to the university’s faculty and staff researchers.