VLab is hosted and supported by the
Minnesota Supercomputing
Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation (MSI) and the
Digital Technology
Center (DTC). MSI and DTC are housed in the Walter
Library on the East Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota. The
building that recently underwent a high-tech renovation and historic
restoration provides to DTC and MSI approximately 40,000 square feet of
assignable space. This includes state-of-the-art conference facilities,
work space for collaborative ventures, a usability laboratory, and
advanced networking, computing, digital design, robotics, and
telecommunications laboratories.
Computing Resources
The MSI currently provides supercomputing resource allocations and technical support for Calhoun (SGI Altix XE 1300 Linux Cluster), IBM BladeCenter Linux Cluster, SGI Altix, IBM Power4, IBM Netfinity Linux Cluster, and Unisys ES7000 systems.
User Support
In addition to providing hardware and software MSI has a user support group to assist researchers in all aspects of scientific computation. The support provided by this team includes, but is not limited to:
- General user assistance
- Assistance with visualization
- Tutorials on specialized topics or programs
- User training and code optimization
- Assistance with communications and information management
- Parallel model building support
- Development of scripts or user-friendly procedures to allow more productive use of the supercomputing resources and peripherals
