High Performance Computing (HPC)

The Hoffman2 cluster is UCLA’s centralized compute resource for campus researchers. The Hoffman2 cluster and its supporting programs help keep the UCLA community at the forefront of scientific discovery and creative endeavors by providing faculty, researchers, and students with access to innovative computational resources, user support, collaboration, and training. The cluster includes both a general campus-use section that is freely available to all interested researchers and a section where researchers with significant computing needs can purchase and contribute nodes for their own priority use.

UCLA’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities (ORCA) and its Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) jointly launched the Hoffman2 cluster in 2008. The Hoffman2 currently consists of over 1,000 64-bit nodes with over 25,000 cores, an aggregate of 138TB of memory, and peak CPU performance of over 160 trillion floating point, double-precision, operations per second (TFLOPS) plus another 200 TFLOPS with GPUs. Each node has Ethernet and Infiniband connectivity. Cluster access is through dual, redundant 100Gb network interconnects to the campus backbone and Science DMZ. 

Hoffman2 resources for researchers includes a job scheduler, compilers, applications, and software libraries, including software specific to chemistry, chemical engineering, engineering, mathematics, visualization, programming, and more. Researchers are also provided with complete system administration for contributed cores, the capability to run large parallel jobs that can take advantage of the cluster’s InfiniBand interconnect, and access to a multi-node NetApp storage system. Current HPC storage capacity is 5PB, augmented by 250TB of flash-based storage for home and scratch directories, and over 6PB of backup storage.

OARC's HPC Systems Research Technology Group manages and maintains the cluster. IDRE’s Executive Committee provides guidance on Hoffman2 operations and direction, and advocates to the campus for necessary research infrastructure enhancements and expansions. IDRE is co-sponsored by OARC and UCLA’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.

More information about using the Hoffman2 cluster can be found on the cluster website.