The Caviness cluster, UD's third Community Cluster, was deployed in July 2018 and is a distributed-memory Linux cluster. It is based on a rolling-upgradeable model for expansion and replacement of hardware over time. The first generation consists of 126 compute nodes (4536 cores, 24.6 TB memory). The nodes are built of Intel "Broadwell" 18-core processors in a dual-socket configuration for 36-cores per node. An OmniPath network fabric supports high-speed communication and the Lustre filesystem (approx 200 TiB of usable space). Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks provide access to additional filesystems and the campus network. The cluster was purchased with a proposed 5 year life to the first generation hardware, putting its refresh in the April 2023 to June 2023 time period.
The Caviness cluster is named in honor of Jane Caviness, former director of Academic Computing Services at the University of Delaware. In the 1980s, Caviness led a ground-breaking expansion of UD's computing resources and network infrastructure that laid the foundation for UD's current research computing capabilities. After leaving UD, Caviness went to the National Science Foundation (NSF) as program director for NSFNET in the newly formed Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure, later serving as deputy division director. She oversaw the implementation of the NSFNET's initial backbone and the expansion of network connectivity between colleges, universities, NSF supercomputer centers, and other research centers. Caviness' activity in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and EDUCOM, including a term as vice-president for Networking at EDUCOM, highlight how strong an advocate she has been for cooperation and collaboration in the research computing community.
