Established in 2003 with support from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Vermont Advanced Computing Center (VACC) is a cornerstone of the University of Vermont’s research enterprise. As a premier high-performance computing facility in New England, the VACC serves as a multidisciplinary hub where advanced technology meets scientific discovery.

Our Mission

The VACC is dedicated to accelerating research impact through three strategic pillars:

• Advancing High-Impact Research: Supporting complex, data-intensive projects across the physical sciences, engineering, medicine, and the humanities.
• Promoting Computational Education: Empowering the next generation of innovators by integrating high-performance computing (HPC) into the classroom and providing hands-on technical outreach.
• Investing in Sustainable Infrastructure: Maintaining and evolving a state-of-the-art computational ecosystem—including our BlueMoon and IceCore clusters—to provide researchers with a competitive edge.

Empowering the Research Community

From modeling climate change and drug discovery to exploring high-throughput AI and machine learning workflows, the VACC provides the massive parallel processing power and specialized storage (such as the DataMountain database cluster) required to solve the most pressing challenges of our time. We are committed to providing UVM faculty, staff, and students with the secure, scalable, and expertly supported environment necessary to turn ambitious ideas into peer-reviewed results. For Cluster Specifications, https://www.uvm.edu/vacc/cluster-specs

The VACC provides the high-performance computing (HPC) resources and technical expertise essential for data-intensive research and discovery. We bridge the gap between complex data challenges and actionable insights.

Our Core Services

• Scalable High-Performance Computing: Access a robust computational environment engineered for speed and reliability. Our infrastructure is designed to handle massive parallel processing tasks while adhering to modern cybersecurity and institutional compliance standards.
• Strategic Data Management & Storage Secure your research throughout its lifecycle. We provide high-capacity storage solutions, including data curation, archiving, and publication tools, to meet grant requirements and promote scientific reproducibility.
• Curated Scientific Software Hit the ground running with an optimized software stack. We actively maintain an extensive library of scientific packages and libraries, ensuring compatibility and peak performance on our clusters.
• Empowering the Next Generation. We go beyond hardware. The VACC offers hands-on workshops, web-based training, and expert consultation to help faculty integrate advanced cyberinfrastructure into their research and classroom curricula.
• Custom Software & Interface Engineering: Leverage our team’s deep expertise in developing specialized software and web interfaces. We help you build and deploy applications specifically tuned for supercomputing environments.

In 2003, with early support from NASA and Senator Patrick Leahy, UVM undertook a campus-wide assessment of current needs and future directions for high-performance computing (HPC) in its research enterprise. The effort included discussions with an expert panel from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as well as UVM research leadership and faculty members across disciplines.

Affectionately known by its many users as the "Bluemoon cluster," the UVM VACC supercomputer has been largely developed with IBM systems architecture. The facility has received three major upgrades since its initial development, with next-generation, IBM high performance computing (HPC) hardware in order to optimize performance and data storage while maximizing data security and energy efficiency for an increasing number of users.

In 2019, using a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the university added a new computing cluster, dubbed DeepGreen. This massively parallel cluster is composed of over 70 GPUs capable of over 8 petaflops of mixed-precision calculations based on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 architecture. Its hybrid design can expedite high-throughput artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows, and its extreme parallelism will forge new and transformative research pipelines.