Accelerating research and discovery through high-performance computing infrastructure
Advanced Research Computing (ARC) made significant upgrades to its HPC infrastructure in FY 2025.
The Owl CPU cluster aallows researchers to complete highly-detailed calculations at incredibly fast speeds compared to previous clusters, providing over 80 terabytes of memory across its 8,700 nodes. Owl also provides superior power usage effectiveness as Virginia Tech’s first direct-to-node water cooled cluster — an important step towards sustainability in HPC.
Falcon, which came online in December 2024, is ARC’s first graphical processing unit (GPU) cluster capable of handling significant artificial intelligence (AI) inference tasks. This 52-node cluster gives researchers, faculty, and students powerful tools to advance AI, analyze complex scientific problems, and innovate across disciplines. By dramatically speeding up data analysis and model development, Falcon empowers VT researchers to make discoveries faster, collaborate more broadly, and keep VT at the forefront of research and innovation.
The Immersa Deck empowers faculty and students to explore complex data, simulations, and designs with unprecedented detail and realism. This cutting-edge, highly immersive 3D visualization environment provides an expanded 700 square feet of display surface, higher resolution with a total pixel capacity of 47,923,200, and advanced laser projection and tracking technologies that allow for a variety of complex research applications.
