ITSC provide high-performance computing (HPC) service to HKUST researchers. The HPC service in HKUST is organized base on the Purdue community cluster model, which is widely adopted by research universities all over the world. The HKUST research community cluster solicit Schools or Departments to contribute funding for procurement of high performance computing machines, while ITSC would assist in coordinating joint purchase, provides the necessary infrastructure, managed data center hosting service, cluster system administration services and hardware maintenance of the machines. Contributors do not solely own the hardware resources while the machines are in the community cluster, instead they have priority to use their contributed resources. Whenever there are idle resources, these spare resources would be made available to other users of the HPC cluster to maximise the overall resource utilization. The machines in the HPC cluster runs with a lifespan of five years and would be subjected to the retirement review from the 6th year onward to redistribute the scarce resources of data center space to new contibutor when needed.
Currently ITSC has TWO high-performance computing clusters available to the university community.
The HPC2 cluster, established in Fall 2016, is designed to cater for CPU-intensive computational jobs and jobs requiring GPU coprocessor support. It is open to all approved university researchers but School of Science and Engineering users have higher access priority.
The HPC3 cluster, established in Spring 2020, is a contributed cluster by faculty members which is designed to cater both CPU-intensive computational jobs and jobs requiring GPU coprocessor support. It is open to all approved university researchers but cluster contributors have higher access priority.