High-Performance Computing

Department Head: Sara Sprenkle sprenkles@wlu.edu
Department Administrator: Carolyn Wingrove-Moore wingrove-moorec@wlu.edu
Mailing Address: Department of Computer Science Washington and Lee University Lexington, Virginia 24450 540-458-8151

In August 2010, W&L welcomed the arrival of hbar, a state-of-the art high performance parallel computing cluster. Named after the fundamental physical constant that refers to the size of quanta in quantum mechanics, hbar consists of 9 dual 6 core Intel x5670 processors (codenamed Westmere) and 2 Tesla C2050 graphical processing units (GPU). With multithreading enabled and the low latency afforded through the quad data rate Infiniband interconnect, this corresponds to 224 processors working in concert on a computation!

Students in BIOL 274 have used hbar to model the dynamics of protein insertion in solvents and lipid membranes. W&L Students and faculty can now look forward to collaborative courses in high performance and GPU computing taught across the departments of Biology and CSCI, and pursue interdisciplinary research interests in the stimulating area of computational biology.