About the Center for High Performance Computing

Since the Center for High Performance Computing's (CHPC) inception (originally as USI - Utah Supercomputing Institute) in 1988, CHPC has focused on cost effectively realizing and enabling the research computing needs for the University.  Historically, CHPC has focused on the deployment and operation of large-scale and high performance computational resources, while also facilitating use of these resources through advanced user support and training. However, as research computing needs have broadened and expanded, so has CHPCʼs purview, user base, and user community. 

Today, CHPC does much more than HPC.  CHPC also serves as an expert team to broadly support the diverse research computing needs on campus.  These needs include support for big data, big data movement, data analytics, security, virtual machines, Windows science application servers, protected environments for data mining and analysis of protected health information, and advanced networking.  CHPC has helped in facilitating projects such as 100Gbps Science DMZ segments at both the University of Utah Downtown Data Center (DDC) and the 40-Gbps campus backbone, dynamic cluster and network provisioning, and software defined networks.  In addition, CHPC has further developed the training and support mechanisms needed for the ever-broadening set of computational research occurring at the University of Utah and beyond.

CHPC is located in the INSCC building just north of the Park Building. We currently employs 22 full-time staff members and about 10-15 part-time students with broad research computing expertise across many domains, from HPC and advanced networking to virtual machines, data, and protected environments. CHPC currently supports more than 650 research groups and includes groups from 45 of the 81 academic departments at  the University of Utah as well as from Utah State University. Currently in the University of Utah Downtown Data Center, CHPC manages over 45,000 cores (over 40,000 of these as compute cores on the HPC clusters) and over 28 PB of RAID configured spinning disks. Here is a short video tour of the CHPC resources at the data center. CHPC also leverages the national cyberinfrastructure for resources and training, including serving as Champions for ACCESS, as partners in the ACI-REF (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators) program, and as a member of RMACC (Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium) and CarCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium).