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Fulton Supercomputing Lab

The FSL is the university sponsored supercomputing resources which has the mission to:

facilitate and enhance computationally-intensive research at BYU by providing reliable, state-of-the-art, high performance computing resources to faculty and students.

It is distinctly directed to provide computing resources for research purposes only, and users are required to:

  1. Justify their need in the form of a written statement
  2. Must have their account sponsored by an appropriate faculty member

The FSL is also harder to use than a normal server to which you have sole access, since its resources are shared across the entire university. It uses a product called SLURM to faciliate the resource sharing, and there are other things to learn about it. Fortunately, the FSL staff provide documentation available at the following link:

https://fsl.byu.edu/documentation/

At this point, you may be asking yourself why it might be worth the hassle of using the FSL. The reason you'd want to consider the FSL is because as of September 2018, the Fulton Supercomputing Lab offers a total of 22,624 CPU cores and over 84 TB of memory across 989 compute nodes, and compute resources are supported by approximately 2 petabytes of storage. Furthermore, there are 32 compute nodes with 4 NVIDIA GK210 GPUs each (in the form of 2 K80 cards which each have 2 of the GK210 GPUs). They also perform the arduous task of upgrading and maintaining the entire system.

The point being is that there may be computational jobs for which glamdring is not enough. That server was meant to serve in the middle ground between jobs too big for indiviual workstations or laptops, but not big enough to justify the hassle of starting a new project on the FSL. In the event that you need more power or space though, the FSL is an available resource.

Speak with a graduate student or Dr. Warnick if you believe your project needs access to the FSL, and if so we can begin the process of sponsoring an account and working with the FSL accordingly.