Mission and governance

The Hoffman2 Cluster is UCLA’s centralized compute resource for campus researchers. The cluster and its supporting programs help keep the UCLA community at the forefront of scientific discovery and creative endeavor by providing faculty, researchers, and students with access to innovative computational resources, user support, collaboration, and training.

UCLA’s Office of Advance Computing (OARC) and the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) jointly launched the Hoffman2 Cluster in 2008. In the intervening years, it has grown to over 25,000 cores across 800+ high-performance compute nodes with an aggregate of over 174TB of memory and 8PB of high-performance network storage. The cluster includes both a general campus-use section that is freely available to all interested researchers, and a condo-style section where researchers with significant computing needs can purchase and contribute nodes for their own priority use.

The Office of Advanced Research Computing’s (OARC) High Performance Computing experts manage and maintain the Hoffman2 Cluster. The IDRE Board provides guidance on the Hoffman2 Cluster operations and direction, and advocates to the campus for necessary research infrastructure enhancements and expansions. IDRE is jointly sponsored by OARC and by the UCLA’s Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Creative Activities (ORCA).

The Hoffman2 Cluster is named for Paul Hoffman (1947-2003).