MRI Collaborative Consortium: Acquisition of a Shared Supercomputer by the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

A cluster supercomputer is deployed by the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) and Colorado State University (CSU) for the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC). This high-performance computing (HPC) system supports multiple research groups across the Rocky Mountain region in fields including astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, earth system science, life science, material science, physics, and social sciences with advanced computing capabilities. It also provides a platform to investigate and address the impact of many-core processors on the applications that support research in these fields. The system integrates nodes populated with Intel's conventional multicore Xeon processors and Many-Integrated-Core (MIC) 'Knights Landing' Phi processors interconnected by Intel's new Omni-Path networking technology. Users of the new HPC system have access to existing data management services including data storage, data sharing, metadata consulting, and data publishing, leveraging the NSF-funded high-performance networking infrastructure and long term storage system, as well as additional cyberinfrastructure, at CU-Boulder and CSU. The many-core feature of this HPC system enhances graduate and undergraduate students' education and training as they develop, deploy, test, and run optimized applications for next generation many-core architectures. Training for researchers and students is provided through workshops appropriate for introducing diverse audiences to the efficient and effective use of HPC systems, the challenges of vectorization for single core performance, shared memory parallelism, and issues of data management. Additionally, advanced workshops on large-scale distributed computing, high-throughput computing, and data-intensive computing are offered during the year and at the annual RMACC student-centric HPC Symposium. The Symposium brings together hundreds of students, researchers, and professionals from universities, national laboratories and industry to exchange ideas and best practices in all areas of cyberinfrastructure. For-credit HPC classes will be delivered for online participation, educating the next generation of computational scientists in state-of-the-art computational techniques.