PACER - Physics and Astronomy Computer for Education and Research

The Physics and Astronomy Computer for Education and Research (PACER), purchased through a generous gift received from the family of Nathan Shrewsbury Lord and Rachel Macauley Smith Lord, will allow faculty and students to engage in frontier computational research areas of Astronomy, Atmospheric Science, Condensed Matter Physics, and High Energy Physics. PACER is a 22 teraflop multi-node, multi-core computing platform equipped with 18 compute nodes, 1 master node, one GPU node, 196 GB memory per node, 2TB hard disk per node, 100 TB disk array for data storage, and a 100 GB switch for inter-node communications. Each compute node contains two 20-core, 2.4 GHz dual Xeon processors for a total of 720 computational cores and the GPU node contains two NVDIA TITAN Xp 12 GB G5X graphics cards. The computing capabilities of PACER will address the needs of data-intensive as well as computationally-intensive researchers and will enable UofL researchers to become major players in computer-aided design of materials and big data research endeavors in astronomy using various ground based and satellite telescopes including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and in high energy physics using the high luminosity particle colliders (at Tsukuba in Japan and the Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago). Thank you to the Lord Family for this generous gift that continues to help make UofL a great place to learn, discover, connect, and work.