For more than a year, Swarthmore and Lafayette College have been working on an ambitious plan to merge our respective high-performance computing (HPC) environments. After much hard work on the part of extensive teams at both institutions, we are pleased to announce the completion of the project!

The result of this combined effort is Firebird! This cluster consists of 20 compute nodes, 5 high-memory nodes, 2 high-CPU nodes, 4 GPU nodes, and 2 storage nodes, offering in total 1,724 cores, 15 GPUs, and over 1.2 PB of storage. For institutions of our size, this is a substantial set of resources, and we anticipate additional expansion this academic year and beyond. HPC versions of many popular software packages are available as well, including Stata, MATLAB, and Mathematica.

Firebird is available for use now. You can request an account, and please reach out to Jason Simms (jsimms1@swarthmore.edu) if you would like to discuss ways in which you can leverage the system in your research, teaching, projects, etc.