Acquisition of a High Performance Computing Cluster for Solar and High-Energy Astrophysics Research

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This is a proposal to acquire a High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) to facilitate the study of solar physics, solar-terrestrial physics, high-energy astrophysics, and astrophysics instrumentation development at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The proposed facility would consist of a high-performance computational engine, data storage, and archiving hardware, as well as visualization hardware and software. The goal would be to develop a significant facility that is freely available to senior scientists, postdocs, and graduate students in the participating research groups. Specifically, the proposed HPCC would support the proposers' primary science goals by enhancing efforts to simulate and model solar and astrophysical processes, facilitating the analysis of large volume datasets from multiple experimental programs, and aiding the characterization of existing (and the development of future) instrumentation by providing a platform for generating instrument simulations with high statistics.The proposers have outlined a model system to achieve these goals that includes a multi-CPU design based on commercially available equipment, high-speed interconnects between CPUs, large data storage capability, archiving hardware and software, data analysis and visualization hardware and software, and software development workstations for students and postdocs.The increasing volumes of experimental data, as well as the complexity of ongoing and future analyses, pose significant data analysis challenges. These factors have the potential to severely restrict data processing throughput, instrument characterization studies, and theoretical modeling programs. A modest investment in computing resources would make a major impact on the scientific return of both existing and future research programs at UAH. The proposed HPCC system is designed to address these issues and to provide a resource that would ensure UAH's continued leadership in the study of the Sun and the Cosmos. This new computational infrastructure would also complement the ongoing efforts of UAH's newly established High Energy Photonics Laboratory (HEPL) by enabling the simulation, design, calibration, and analysis of instrumentation developed in that laboratory.