The Research Computning and Cyberinfrastructure group is a unit of Information Technology Services (ITS). The RCC group strives to meet the computing technology needs of scholars in their education and research endeavors at Penn State. The group pursues cutting-edge advances in research computing technology in partnerships with faculty members and in strong technical collaborations with various technology companies and institutions. The RCC group was formerly known as Graduate Education and Research Services (GEaRS), please bear with us as we transition our web pages to reflect the recent organizational change.
The High Performance Computing group offers a variety of machines for use
in physical, biological and social sciences, engineering, and business
related computations. These include: Lion-XO, a cluster consisting of dual
Opteron 2.5 Ghz processors connected with Inifiniband, LION-XM, a cluster
consisting of 168 dual 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon processors connected with
Myrinet, LION-XL, a cluster consisting of 176 dual 2.8 GHz Intel P4
Processors connected with Quadrics Elan3, and LION-XD, a cluster of 16
dual 2.0 GHz Opteron blades connected with Infiniband. The HPC group also
offers a Unisys ES7000 system to provide users with access to a large SMP
server with 32 Itanium2 processors and 64 Gigabytes of memory. LION-XM and
LION-XL have been built in a collaborative partnership with several Penn
State faculty members, departments, and institutes. It has helped
consolidate and thus significantly increased the research computing
resources available to each participant. The HPC group continually
researches issues relating to operating systems, file systems, storage,
scheduling, high-speed interconnect, compilers, libraries, and application
codes, and implements a consistent set of solutions for use by faculty and
students.
The Visualization group at RCC offers facilities and related
consulting to help researchers gain insight into their data, work
telecollaboratively with their peers at other institutions, and enable the
use of visualization techniques in teaching and research.
The ACCESS Grid Node uses multicast internetworking to allow
group-to-group voice and video teleconferencing, applications and data
sharing among multiple remotely-located participants.
The group is also involved in several visualization facility partnerships.
The Immersive Environments Lab, a joint effort of ITS and SALA, uses
virtual reality projection techniques to create a three-screen, 3D
stereoscopic, immersive multimedia display. The IEL, a lab open to all
Penn State faculty and students, provides a cross platform (Windows, Mac,
Linux) venue for incorporating such technology in teaching and research in
the design arts, sciences and engineering disciplines. An additional lab
of similar design to the IEL is planned in partnership with faculty in
architectural engineering for developing interactive VR techniques for the
construction industry.
The Sports Medicine VR Lab, a partnership with researchers in kinesiology
and the college of medicine, combines a single-screen, linux-based, VR
display with specialized measurement devices to assess relationships among
cognitive activity, postural response and motion stimuli in the visual
field of subjects who have suffered mild brain trauma.
The Stereo Lecture Classroom, an ITS facility partly supported by the
visualization group, offers a high-resolution (2048 x 768) 3D stereoscopic
projection display for presenting 3D data or other advanced multimedia in
a lecture classroom.
The Display Wall uses scalable real-time rendering on a cluster of 12
computers to display high-resolution images with nearly 10 million pixels
on a 6' X 11' large-format screen. The 12-tile display enables viewing of
significant detail in any portion of a complex visualization while at the
same time viewing the larger context in which such detail occurs.
