On this page: About Janus | NCAR users

NCAR collaborates with the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Colorado, Denver, to provide additional supercomputing resources to the Colorado Front Range area. Through this collaboration, NCAR obtained access to approximately 10% of a 184-teraflops Dell supercomputer system called “Janus.”

Janus is housed on the CU-Boulder campus and has a high-speed networking connection to the computing and data storage systems at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. Allocations of a portion of this resource are available to the university community through the proposal process described below.

About the Janus system

The Janus computational system is a Dell Linux cluster consisting of 1,368 nodes. Each node in turn contains two, 2.8-GHz Intel Westmere processors, each with six cores. Each node has 24 GB of memory (2 GB/core). The system thus has a total of 16,416 cores and 32.8 TB of main memory. The nodes are connected using a fully non-blocking quad-data-rate (QDR) InfiniBand interconnect. The system has roughly 800 TB of usable disk storage in a Lustre parallel file system.

For more information about using the Janus cluster, go to the University of Colorado’s Research Computing web site. To get announcements about Janus outages and updates, subscribe to the RC-Announce mailing list.

If you plan to run the Community Earth System Model (CESM) or the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model on Janus, also see CESM and WRF.

Resources available to university researchers

NCAR is able to offer university researchers small start-up allocations on Janus in preparation for running on the Yellowstone petascale computing resource.

Users wishing to store data at NCAR, either on GLADE or in the HPSS archive, must have the appropriate storage allocations in place at NCAR to support that data plan.

NCAR users

NCAR’s share of the Lustre parallel file system is approximately 80 TB. Users can expect the majority of this storage space to be scrubbed regularly to keep the organizational usage within the agreed-upon footprint.

Please see Quick start for NCAR users.