The Smithsonian Institution High Performance Computing Cluster is managed by Smithsonian OCIO Office of Research Computing. The cluster, informally known as 'Hydra' was started originally by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and has since been relocated to the Herndon Data Center (HDC). Hydra serves the entire institution and currently is used primarily by astrophysicists and biologists.
- Hydra currently consists of 93 compute nodes, adding up to some 5,088 CPUs and 39TB of total memory (RAM).
- Hydra has a total of 3 PB of High Performance and near-line storage.
- Recent upgrades include the addition of compute nodes with large amount of memory to increase its suitability for memory intensive biology tasks such as de novo genome assembly, and a larger and more powerful storage system.
More information including instructions for obtaining an account and accessing the cluster can be found at the following links: