In June 2025, ITS completed a substantial upgrade to the 成人快播 College High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The project was designed to meet the growing needs of computational research, and to prepare for research into AI through training large language models.
The HPC is used by approximately 400 researchers in the BC community to support their scientific research. Examples of research projects that have used the HPC include studying seismic activity on the ocean floor, using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on MRI images to better understand autism, and quantum chemistry applications.
The two-year effort began with a file system upgrade to increase both storage performance and capacity. Additionally, backup capacity was added with geographical redundancy. Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) resources were doubled, including the latest and most powerful H200 GPU currently available.听Migration from the old to the new file system involved moving over 900 TB of data, 400 user accounts, and over 50 software builds.
To meet the needs of research in Chemistry and Physics, high RAM CPU nodes were also added. This allows for both faster processing, and allows investigators to perform simulations that were not practical before the upgrade due to long processing times. In some benchmarking examples the computational times were reduced by a factor of 10.
This project was lead by ITS Academic Research Services in collaboration with ITS Systems Engineering, ITS Infrastructure and the advice of many faculty including the Research Computing Committee.听