{"id":9840,"date":"2025-08-07T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T13:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/?p=9840"},"modified":"2025-08-06T11:17:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T15:17:44","slug":"firebird-summer-successes-and-fall-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/2025\/08\/07\/firebird-summer-successes-and-fall-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Firebird: Summer Successes and Fall Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Firebird, <a href=\"https:\/\/swatkb.atlassian.net\/wiki\/spaces\/ACADTECH\/pages\/161546272\/Firebird+Computing+Cluster\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarthmore&#8217;s HPC cluster<\/a>, saw unprecedented use over the summer, largely in support of faculty research and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swarthmore.edu\/summer-scholars-program\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Summer Scholars Program<\/a>. The cluster accelerated research in many disciplines, including Physics &amp; Astronomy, Economics, Engineering, Biology, Mathematics, and more. As the following image shows, during the month of July, around 80% of Firebird&#8217;s CPU cores were consistently in use:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"512\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores-1024x512.png\" alt=\"A plot showing daily percentage usage during July 2025 of all available CPU cores on the Firebird computing cluster.\" class=\"wp-image-9841\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores-1024x512.png 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores-300x150.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores-768x384.png 768w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores-120x60.png 120w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-cores.png 1117w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of Firebird&#8217;s 15 GPUs were likewise in heavy use:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"504\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus-1024x504.png\" alt=\"A plot showing daily percentage usage during July 2025 of all available GPUs on the Firebird computing cluster.\" class=\"wp-image-9842\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus-1024x504.png 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus-300x148.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus-768x378.png 768w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus-122x60.png 122w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-gpus.png 1108w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition, many users took advantage of Firebird&#8217;s revamped and expanded web interface, offering virtual desktops, a file manager, terminal access, Jupyter notebooks, and more:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-style-default\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"499\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-1024x499.png\" alt=\"A screenshot of the web interface to the Firebird computing cluster.\" class=\"wp-image-9843\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-1024x499.png 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-300x146.png 300w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-768x374.png 768w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-1536x748.png 1536w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood-123x60.png 123w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/firebird-ood.png 1770w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We are excited to say that we recently added two additional nodes to Firebird: a GPU node offering two NVIDIA H200 double-precision GPUs, and an additional high-memory node offering 2 TB of memory to support larger memory-intensive tasks. During fall, we will also be expanding further with another GPU node, offering two Blackwell RTX6000 Server Edition GPUs, which are purpose-built for AI tasks, and which will increase our total number of GPUs to 19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We encourage anyone interested in using Firebird, either for research or classroom use, to reach out to Jason Simms (jsimms1@swarthmore.edu).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Firebird, Swarthmore&#8217;s HPC cluster, saw unprecedented use over the summer, largely in support of faculty research and the Summer Scholars Program. The cluster accelerated research in many disciplines, including Physics &amp; Astronomy, Economics, Engineering, Biology, Mathematics, and more. As the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/2025\/08\/07\/firebird-summer-successes-and-fall-plans\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Firebird: Summer Successes and Fall Plans<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":9844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,357,430],"tags":[90,350,201,481],"class_list":{"0":"post-9840","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-academic-technology","8":"category-high-performance-computing","9":"category-research","10":"tag-featured","11":"tag-hpc","12":"tag-research","13":"tag-research-computing","15":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/phoenix-laptop-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ph2nPL-2yI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9845,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions\/9845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/its\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}