GPU expansion

The Panther cluster was expanded with 4 additional GPU Nodes. These are in addition to the 2 GPU nodes already in the cluster, increasing the available GPU power to 6 nodes.

The new nodes were purchased from Dell, and house very powerful Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs.  Users of software packages that make use of GPU can see a large increase in computing power. For example, NAMD projects may run as much as eight times faster than with CPU alone. This represents a large step forward for researchers doing molecular dynamics.