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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Fulton Supercomputing Lab, FSL, compute clusters, processing jobs, researcher's code

College

Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Department

Computer Science

Abstract

BYU’s Fulton Supercomputing Lab (FSL) is a centralized campus resource whose mission is “to facilitate and enhance computationally-intensive research at BYU by providing reliable, state-of-the-art, high performance computing resources to faculty and students.” As part of that mission, Supercomputing provides large compute clusters and other systems for researchers to use as needed. If a researcher needs to do computationally intensive research that wouldn’t be feasible on a standard desktop, they can submit batch processing jobs to the lab’s systems and get their work done in a fraction of the time. A researcher’s code is then run in parallel on many processors on Supercomputing’s systems. For instance, Supercomputing has a particular user from Chemical Engineering who needs to do lots of runs of a large number of simulations. Each run would take him about two years on a single processor, but because he is able to use some of the lab’s resources, each of the runs takes about two to four days to complete. If more resources were available to him, he would be able to get his work done in a much shorter time and could get more runs through in the same amount of time.

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