Introducing Ahalama!

Featuring 20 teraflops of 40 x 12-core nodes with 32 TB storage and Gigabit interconnect

What is Ahalama?

The Ahalama cluster is the strongest supercomputer of Bar Ilan University and results from generous donations towards the construction of the Faculty of Medicine of Bar Ilan University. The purpose of the cluster is to facilitate biomedical research problems ranging in scale from molecules to organisms. The Ahalama cluster is housed in the computer center of the Faculty of Medicine, and bears the Hebrew name of convalescence.

What's new?

The latest cluster events can be found on the news page.

The Ahalama supercomputing cluster was installed in January 2012. The new cluster utilizes cutting-edge technologies and fast interconnects.

Why use this supercomputer?

Ahalama is the one of the existing most powerful supercomputers in Israel with 502 cores within 40 Dell PowerEdge C6100 compute nodes (dual-socket hexa-core Intel E5645 processors), and 2 Dell PowerEdge R310 head nodes (dual socket hexa-core Intel X3450 processors), featuring 24 GB of memory each. The cluster storage includes a 32 TB parallel NAS file system within a Dell PowerVault NX3500 and a gigabit switch fabric interconnects the nodes and disks. Running under Linux OS, the cluster is available to all faculty for their computations (i.e. molecular dynamics simulations, whole genome analysis, drug design, etc) using SGE for job scheduling. The Ahlama cluster is continously maintained by a dedicated system administrator. See the Hardware section of the documentation for more details.

Creating shared computing resources allows many groups to combine their hardware efforts into a central resource. The resulting system is larger than any individual lab could fund and manage on their own. Systems administration is greatly reduced, allowing you to focus on your research.

How can I get an account?

If you're member of a lab of the Faculty of Medicine, please send a request with the subject: “Open a student account on Ahalama” to gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il (Note: You cannot open a student account unless your lab is registered (see how to register your lab below)
If you're a PI of the Faculty of Medicine, and want to register your lab, please send a request with the subject “Register my lab on Ahalama” to gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il

Make sure to include your preferred username, e-mail address, physical address, phone number, and PI name.

More information

Please see our documentation for more details. Note that accounts are restricted to projects involving biomedical applications, broadly defined. Please contact Dr. Avraham Samson (avraham.samson@biu.ac.il) if you have any questions or comments regarding scientific matters, or Gershon Kunin (gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il) for administrative, technical, or documentation questions.