ITSO provides high-performance computing (HPC) service to HKUST researchers.  The HPC service in HKUST is organized base on the Purdue community cluster model, which is widely adopted by research universities all over the world.  The HKUST research community cluster solicits Schools or Departments to contribute funding for procurement of high performance computing machines, while ITSO would assist in coordinating joint purchase, provides the necessary infrastructure, managed data center hosting service, cluster system administration services and hardware maintenance of the machines.  Contributors do not solely own the hardware resources while the machines are in the community cluster, instead they have priority to use their contributed resources.  Whenever there are idle resources, these spare resources would be made available to other users of the HPC cluster to maximize the overall resource utilization.  The machines in the HPC cluster runs with a lifespan of five years and would be subjected to the retirement review from the 6th year onward to redistribute the scarce resources of data center space to new contributors when needed. 

In response to the substantial demand for HPC computing resources at HKUST and to optimize the utilization of the limited resources available within the HPC data center for the broader research community, ITSO can solely accommodate HPC machines that are willing to integrate into the community cluster.