Data Center

The Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics has its own compute cluster purpose built to search for gravitational-wave signals in large astronomical data sets. The cluster, called Nemo, is in a data center on the first floor of the KIRC Building on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. This facilty was built and is operated by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration group at UW-Milwaukee. Nemo is used for development and production data analysis by members of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration.

Specifications:

Nemo has 2280 processor cores which provide a peak theoretical performance of 220 teraFLOPS of computing power:

95 nodes with 24 Intel Xeon Gold 6136 cores running at 3.0GHz and 192GB of RAM. Deployed in Summer 2018.
675 TBytes of storage using a Ceph file system.
The system is networked with 10Gb/s ethernet LAN switches.

Funding:

Nemo was funded on September 15, 2016 by a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation ($874,669) and by matching funds from UW-Milwaukee ($374,852). UW-Milwaukee also provided the space for the data center.