Computer Cluster

The Department of Physics and Astronomy owns and operates a 48-node computer cluster designated specifically for undergraduate physics and astronomy students. All physics and astrophysics majors receive an account on the cluster and may use it for their course work and projects.

The cluster computers can be used individually as scientific workstations or in parallel as a true computational cluster. Each cluster node comes installed with more than four thousand different software packages covering all aspects of computer use. A full suite of scientific tools are provided for:

• data analysis
• numerical computation
• scientific visualization
• serial and parallel programming in multiple computer languages
• symbolic algebra
• and the standard industrial tools IDL, Macsyma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab

The use of this cluster for computational physics and the solution of physics problems is taught to all physics and astrophysics majors as a standard component of their curriculum.