Compute
ARC offers a variety of compute resources for Virginia Tech researchers and departments, including CPU, GPU, and high-throughput computing clusters. Learn more about our compute clusters below:
TinkerCliffs came online in the summer of 2020, and it is our largest CPU cluster with nearly 42,000 compute cores and over 93 TB of RAM. It is housed in the Steger Hall HPC Data Center on the main Blacksburg campus.
Infer came online in January of 2021 and provides 18 nodes, each with an Nvidia T4 GPU. This cluster is a great all-purpose resource for researchers who are making their first forays into GPU-enabled computations of any type.
The OWL cluster became available for general use in August 2024. The compute nodes on OWL are exclusively CPU-based, and direct water cooling allows for running at boost speeds (3.8GHz) indefinitely which is 40% higher than the base clock rate. OWL contains 84 base compute nodes, which offer 768GB memory per node, or 8GB memory per core. Three additional very large memory nodes enable computational workloads for which we have previously not had sufficient memory resources.