CC* Compute: A high-performance computing cluster to accelerate research, education, and training at Rhodes College

Rhodes College, Memphis TN

Investigators

Abstract

Rhodes College is building and deploying a high-performance computing cluster that serves as the cornerstone of a campus-wide research computing center. This project establishes a needed computing resource that enables new capabilities for researchers and students in computer science, biology, mathematics, chemistry, and economics. The cluster provides a new computing resource at a scale not previously available on campus and advances the institutions' ability to support research, including analyzing mitochondrial DNA, modeling inorganic compounds, and improving the performance and usability of parallel and distributed systems. As a research-intensive liberal arts college, this cluster system at Rhodes College dramatically advances the opportunities for students to be engaged in computation-based scientific research alongside researchers in a wide range of disciplines. This cluster system also functions as a platform for classroom experiences that help students understand how computational methods can be used to better understand the world. The system supports class activities in computer science, biology, and mathematics. Additionally, this project enables researchers to prepare their experiments to run on national compute resources through XSEDE and will also contribute unused computing resources to the Open Science Grid, a national, distributed computing partnership. The cluster system supports both high-performance and high-throughput workloads with an overall system capacity of 1,584 cores, 9TB of memory, and 504 TB of storage. The cluster is comprised of a login server, storage server, 44 compute nodes, and a 100Gbit/s InfiniBand interconnect network. 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.