Welcome to the SLAC Shared Scientific Data Facility (SDF). This site provides a web based front end to all things related to high performance computing (HPC) and storage at SLAC.
!> We're still beta-testing SDF; if you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us!
Science at SLAC is often powered by intensive numerical analysis of large datasets: the computation and storage needs for large scale science projects such as x-ray crystallography and CryoEM often requires petaflops of compute and petabytes of storage. The SDF serves to provide the hardware and software infrastructure in order to keep science ticking.
The SDF is comprised of many high powered compute servers interconnected with high speed networking fabrics. This in turn is connected to high performance storage. This, as well as the ecosystem that utilises all this power, is what we call the SDF.
SDF is owned and operated by SLAC's Scientific Computing Services in partnership with, and in support of, the SLAC research community.
The SDF is tuned specifically to allow large and small compute and storage tasks. By storing your scientific datasets on the SDF, you will benefit from the economies of scale to help drive down the cost of data management. Through community sharing of compute resources you will be able to obtain compute cycles funded through indirects, whilst at the same time having immediate access to resources that you own
All SLAC employees, researchers and facility users have free access to the SDF. Now, free does not necessarily mean capable: every user, by default, is added to a shared partition that allows you to immediately submit jobs onto the clusters, but which has low priority on the queue. Each user is also entitled to long and short term storage for both themselves and their "groups" free of charge. Please see Resources for up-to-date information.
If you find that you need more compute and or storage for your scientific needs, please see contributing to SDF.