University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in Minneapolis, Minnesota is a core research facility of the University of Minnesota that provides hardware and software resources, as well as technical user support, to faculty and researchers at the University and at other institutions of higher education in Minnesota. MSI is located in Walter Library, on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

MSI Walter Library

History
MSI Sign

In 1981, the University of Minnesota became the first U.S. university to acquire a supercomputer, a Cray-1. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community. MSI currently has two HPC systems available for use.

MSI is part of Research Computing in the Office of the Vice President for Research. Research Computing is an umbrella organization that comprises the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute, and U-Spatial.

Memberships

Currently MSI is a member of the Minnesota High Tech Association, the Great Lakes Consortium, and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

Mission

The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute seeks to provide researchers at the University of Minnesota and at other institutions of higher education in the state of Minnesota access to high-performance computing resources and user support to facilitate successful and cutting-edge research in all disciplines, help researchers attract funding, contribute to undergraduate and graduate education, and benefit the broader community.

MSI is committed to expanding and developing the types of service it offers in order to continue to play its key support role across the growing spectrum of scientific fields.

MSI is also committed to facilitating University-industry collaboration and to promoting technology transfer through the interchange of ideas in the field of supercomputing research, including the dissemination of results of research accomplished with MSI resources.

Supercomputing capabilities

HPC resources
MSI Data center 1
  • "Mesabi": Mesabi is an HP heterogeneous system. It is a distributed cluster featuring a large number of nodes with leading edge Intel processors that are tightly integrated via a very high speed communication network. It is currently being installed and tested.
  • Itasca: Itasca is an HP Linux cluster with 1,091 HP ProLiant BL280c G6 blade servers, each with two quad-core 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon X5560 "Nehalem EP" processors sharing 24 GiB of system memory, plus 51 Proliant BL460c G8 blade servers, each with two eight-core 2.6 GHz E5-2670 Xeon "Sandy Bridge EP" processors with 64, 128, or 256 GiB of memory, with a 40-gigabit QDR InfiniBand (IB) interconnect. In total, Itasca consists of 9,712 compute cores and 25 TiB of main memory.

Laboratories

References

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