MRI-R2 : Acquisition of a Heterogenous Terascale Shared Campus Computing Facility

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"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)." Proposal #: 09-59382PI(s): Fisher, Robert T.; Cowles, Geoffrey; W., Gottlieb; Sigal, Khanna, Gaurav; Wang, ChengInstitution: University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth North Dartmouth, MA 02727-2300Title: MRI-R2: Acquisition of a Heterogeneous Terascale Shared Campus Computing FacilityProject Proposed :This project, acquiring a heterogeneous terascale parallel computer cluster incorporating graphics processing units (GPUs), services an inter- and multi-disciplinary group of mathematicians and computational scientists and engineers, and their undergraduate and graduate students. This shared campus research instrument leverages an existing small-scale cluster without GPUs at UMass-Dartmouth resulting in a combined system of more than four times the size. Specifically, the proposed cluster contains 32 8-way nodes (256 cores) plus one NVIDIA Tesla GPU per node for a total of 32 GPUs. The cluster is not intended to be a general computing resource, but rather highly specialized instrument necessary for the development of high-performance algorithms for scientific computation by the group of researchers in the proposal. Researchers will take advantage of the incorporation of the GPUs in each node to develop hybrid parallel and many-core-architecture-based computing. The investigators will abstract out these GPU-accelerated solvers into an open source GPU Scientific Library (GPUSL), which will be cleanly separated from the overlying simulation codes through a set of well-defined interfaces. Faculty members from the Physics, Mathematics, Marine Science and Civil Engineering departments at UMass-Dartmouth have formed a scientific computing group that will become the core management and user group of the shared computational resources. The research foci of the group range from Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds (using the FLASH code) to Coastal Ocean Modeling (using the FVCOM code) to the Simulation of an Incompressible Turbulent Convective Fluid. Activities of this group include research collaborations, weekly team meetings for the sharing of expertise on numerical algorithms, co-advising of students, and a development of a multi-disciplinary doctoral program. The cluster will be housed in the Campus Information Technology Services (CITS) data center at UMass-Dartmouth, and directly supported by the CITS Enterprise Systems Administration Team. This team will be responsible for preventive maintenance session backup and recovery of user disk space. The access to the machine and its allocation will be handled by a Research User Group Committee which will be responsible for soliciting proposals from faculty members seeking computer time and will also be responsible for balancing the research needs of the faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in the user base.Broader Impacts: The availability of this cluster allows for the training of the next generation of high performance computing experts, and supports a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in computational science, currently in development. Graduate students benefit from the opportunity to develop cutting-edge parallel and GPU-accelerated algorithms for a variety of challenging physical problems, in a multi-disciplinary setting. The cluster also directly benefits undergraduate education, as part of the NSF-funded Computational Science for Undergraduate Mathematics Students (CSUMS) project, which aims to prepare undergraduate students for, and engage them in, a sustained research experience in computational mathematics. The approach is to recruit promising high school seniors, then guide freshman and sophomores students through research topics in computational science, and culminate by mentoring seniors through carefully selected research projects.In addition, UMass-Dartmouth has a successful tradition of broadening higher-education access to underrepresented students through its College Now Steps Toward Abstract Reasoning and Thinking (START) program. Over its 40-year history, the program has played a significant role in broadening STEM access to disadvantaged students to women and underrepresented minorities; in particular, approximately 25% - 30% of START students in recent semesters are underrepresented minority persons of color. For the scientific community, all computer codes developed on this enabling cluster, including the GPU Software Library, will be released via a dedicated website, immediately impacting more than 2500 researchers worldwide who use the community codes FLASH and FVCOM.