December 15, 2016

‘BigDog’ supercomputer is available for use

‘BigDog,’ the university’s cutting-edge supercomputer, is now available to faculty and students through the Office of Information and Technology (OIT).

OIT will offer faculty and students instruction on how to access and use this powerful research tool in January. Chet Langin, research coordinator, will lead a BigDog startup session on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 at 10 a.m., and again on Jan. 31 at 1:30 p.m. The sessions are in Morris Library, Room 174. To register, contact Linda Hubbs at olindahubbs@siu.edu.

Access to BigDog is free for research to SIU Carbondale faculty and supervised students. Departments, faculty, or students with big projects that require lots of data, computing speed, memory, or storage are encouraged to ask about using BigDog for their research projects.

Researchers often spend grant dollars on “big” cyber-infrastructure; access to BigDog is as convenient as a departmental cluster, provides more computing power, and frees up funding for other resources. Langin can serve as an in-house expert.

Others are using BigDog or similar supercomputers to do advanced research in biochemistry, pharmacy, medicine, engineering, physics, astronomy, and many other fields. More information about research computing and cyberinfrastructure is available here, and the application to apply for a BigDog account is here.