Shared Facilities

Mechanical Testing
Facility

Computational Mechanics
Research Facility

Metallic Materials
Research Group

Nano & Micro
Mechanics Lab

X-Ray Diffraction
Facility

Molecular Beam
Epitaxy Facility

Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Facility

MTF CMRF MM NML X-Ray MBE NMR

Computational Mechanics Research Facility

The Computational Mechanics Research Facility is the primary computing facility for the solid mechanics and materials science research groups at Brown. The facility operates on a client/server based distributed computing environment. It contains a central server and thirty-eight workstations. Twenty-four workstations are clustered within the facility and the rest are distributed through the Barus and Holley Engineering Building in various offices. All workstations have local system, swap, and scratch disks for optimal performance.

The central server and twenty-eight workstations are Digital Alpha based and run Compaq True64 UNIX as the operating system with the CDE based graphical user interface. Nine Pentium II based PC-workstations run Windows NT 4.0. In 1998, MRSEC funds were used to replace the old Alpha server with two model 1200 Alpha servers. One is being used as a compute server for larger computations and the other functions primarily as a file and application server. The MRSEC funds also replaced six work station monitors and were used to purchase an HP Color Laser Printer. In 2000, a new 16-node compute cluster, funded by an NSF grant, will be installed. It will enable users to perform large scale parallel computation using the MPI-based message passing protocol. This complex will have sixteen Compaq XP-1000 nodes.

Laurenz Hermann, Director of Computing, is in charge of the facility. The annual operating costs are recovered by charging users for disk storage and printer usage plus a monthly fee for maintaining an account.

For further information contact:

Laurenz Hermann
Director of Computing
Phone: (401) 863-1500
Barus & Holley, Room 745
Brown University

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Brown University, Providence RI 02912