MRI: Acquisition of a High-Performance Computing Cluster for Research and Teaching at UC Irvine

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This acquisition provides a modern, energy-efficient, campus-wide, High-Performance Computing Community Cluster (HPC3) enabling research and research training in areas ranging from elementary particle physics and quantum chemistry through earth-system modeling and engineering to social ecology. HPC3 is expected to deliver a combination of high flexibility and user friendliness with high efficiency for both massively parallel and shared memory applications that is not always achievable by centralized supercomputing or cloud computing facilities. The acquisition is a mixed CPU/GPU cluster that provides substantial computing power to a diverse, high-performance computing (HPC) community of 13 major user research groups as well as other researchers and students at the institution and three local partnering campuses of California State University. The acquisition will also be used by researchers across the Nation by virtue of HPC3's integration with the Open Science Grid (OSG) and eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Examples of research projects that will use HPC3 include: new elementary particle discovery, first-principles simulations of high-temperature superconductors and quantum spin liquids, simulations of warm dense matter, electronic structure of small-gap compounds, nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations of photocatalysts and light-driven materials, Monte Carlo simulations of crowded protein solutions, thermodynamic properties of pharmaceuticals, RNA sequencing, alignment of biological networks, ice-sheet modeling, global climate modeling including cloud effects, geophysical climate data analysis, multiscale materials modeling, and simulations of turbulent flow. All partnering universities are Hispanic-serving institutions, and minorities underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields will be actively recruited through mentoring and outreach on campus and to local high schools in underserved areas. HPC3 will also support the development of highly optimized HPC software used by scientists worldwide for simulations in condensed matter physics, quantum chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, and earth system science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.