Athena . Bryn Mawr . Edu

Welcome to Athena!

The cluster is currently undergoing maintenance and will not be available for job submission untill further notice.

Welcome to Athena, Bryn Mawr College's high-performance computer cluster. In ancient times, Athena was the goddess of many things including mathematics, strategy, and skill. It only makes sense that now she is also known as the goddess of powerful computation for the arts and sciences.

The Athena Computer Cluster is the most powerful computer system at Bryn Mawr College. It has 84 compute cores across 7 nodes. It has 512 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) on the main node, and 384 gigabytes of RAM each on the other 6. It has 144 terabytes of hard disk storage accessible over a high-speed network.

The cluster is a Beowulf-class computer. This is a class of computer that uses many low-cost, commodity CPUs, locally connected, running on open source software, creating an economical but powerful computer system.

Athena is used in the arts and sciences by students and faculty for a variety of projects, including Bioinformatics and Genomics analysis in Biology, calculating the rotational barriers for intramolecular rotation (like methyl group rotation) in van der Waals molecular solids in Physics, and simulated evolution and neural modeling in Computer Science.

Useful links:

  1. New Jupyter server for notebook-based computation
  2. Athena wiki
  3. Galaxy through Dayhoff
  4. Tutorial on using Python and MPI
  5. Athena Statistics
  6. Original Beowulf Cluster at Bryn Mawr College - built in 2004 by students, faculty, and staff

Athena was purchased in 2012 with funding provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Bryn Mawr College. In 2014-2017, funding for development of the Jupyter server was provided by the TIDES project, through the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust by AAC&U.

The Athena Computer Cluster Steering Committee:


Funding, for equipment and development, provided by: