Euclid brings new computing capabilities to UW-Madison researchers

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a significant new computing resource. Dubbed the Euclid cluster, it enables research projects to marshal the power of many computers at once to run large-scale computing jobs much faster and to move large datasets and files at high speeds among individual servers that make up the cluster. Euclid serves as a showcase for state-of-the-art, open-source software and technologies that could benefit the UW research community. Euclid is now the single largest high-performance computing (HPC) cluster at UW-Madison. Created by a partnership of several campus departments, it offers almost 2,100 computer cores in 261 servers that are closely coupled by a high-speed network. This affords a peak theoretical performance of about 19 Teraflops, a level beyond that provided by about 1,000 typical desktop computers. With Euclid, a researcher could use all of the cluster's available power at once to run parallel jobs on large numbers of processors.