MRI: Acquisition of an Extreme GPU Cluster for Interdisciplinary Research

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Stanford University requests $3,500,000 over 36 months to acquire an extreme GPU HPC cluster, called X-GPU, comprising 54 compute nodes built using the Cray Hydra technology with FDR Infiniband. Each node has Intel Haswell 12-cores; 8 NVIDIA Kepler cards; 128 GB of DDR4 memory; a 120 GB SSD and two 1 TB hard drives. energy-efficient, computational facility providing almost a petaflop of computational power. It will be used by 1) at least 25 research groups representing more than 100 students and postdoctorals at Stanford across 15 departments and 4 schools, 2) at least 8 collaborators from at least 7 other institutions across the nation, and 3) by as many as hundreds of national researchers through the NSF-sponsored XSEDE allocation system. The PIs plan to offer 25% of X-GPU to XSEDE to offset the impacts from the planned retiring of Keeneland, the current XSEDE resource providing heterogeneous parallel computing with CPUs and GPUs to the national community.Identified scientific outcomes enabled by this instrument include, but not limited to: astrophysics and cosmology, bioinformatics and biology, materials modeling, and climate modeling. The researchers have already invested significant efforts to develop modeling and simulation codes that can demonstrate high performance on GPU-accelerated clusters. The PIs plan develop software infrastructure and educational materials to help the national community in the transition to fine-grained parallel thinking and algorithm design, which is critical to effectively use this novel high-performance, low-cost, energy-efficient architecture.