Laboratory computing center (copier)

(update may 23th 2024)

Person in charge: Vincent DEGAT

The computing center consists of a set of computers whose pooled resources allow IMN's modelers to increase their computing power.

Technical specifications

Computers are classified in "tier" levels: a local computer such as the laboratory one, is tier-3. It is complementary to the CCIPL regional computer (mesocenter, tier-2) and to the national centers (tier-1). It allows the initiation to modeling (trainees, doctoral students) or the implementation of small-scale parallel calculations. The Institute's computing cluster is composed of 24 machines - including 22 computing nodes - interconnected by a fast dedicated network ("Infiniband" network at 40 Gb/s). The storage of computational data offers a capacity of 7 TB (permanent storage) and 13 TB for intermediate results ("scratch"); it has 304 cores with 4 GB RAM/core available for calculations:

- 12 nodes dual-processor Intel Xeon E5-2620, 6 cores

- 10 nodes dual-processor Intel Xeon Silver 4110, 8 cores

This cluster is located in an air-conditioned room to maintain an optimal operating temperature. It is protected by a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) in order to avoid untimely electrical variations.

Terms of access

Anyone from IMN can get an account on the IMN computer without any condition. The submission of computational jobs is possible from a machine connected to the laboratory network or through the VPN from outside (the laboratory).

Available softwares

Any software owned by the laboratory can be compiled on the computer. The following codes are already installed and available to everyone:

• • • AIMPRO
    • VASP
    • Wien2K
    • GAUSSIAN

Molecular dynamics codes:

• • • LAMMPS

Thermodynamics/statistics codes:

• • • ATAT

Visualization tools:

• • • ATOMEYE
    • jMol
    • Avogadro
    • VMD
    • Diamond
    • VESTA
    • OVITO