Firebird, Swarthmore’s high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, is completing its first full calendar year in service, and what a year it’s been! In 2025, the user communities from both Swarthmore and Lafayette College collectively ran more than 459,000 jobs, totaling over 10,374,000 CPU hours (that’s more than 1,184 years). We enhanced the cluster’s capabilities, including expanding the memory on the login node and adding a high-memory node, a compute node, and a new GPU node with RTX6000 Blackwell GPUs. Firebird also contributed about 3,000,000 CPU hours to public science, through participation in the OSPool.

Looking forward, 2026 promises to be another productive year. In particular, we are focusing on improving Firebird’s storage capacity and organization. We’re also planning to make Globus more widely available to manage larger-scale data transfers to/from AWS S3 collections, Google Drive, Firebird, and beyond.

We’re hoping to see Firebird used in additional courses and by students for various projects. If you would be interested in discussing some options, please reach out to Jason Simms (jsimms1@swarthmore.edu).