CC* Compute: A Cost-Effective, 2,048 Core InfiniBand Cluster at UTC for Campus Research and Education

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A team of researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) will make a significant upgrade to the campus cyberinfrastructure that will provide state-of-the-art, cost-effective high-performance computing not previously possible. This project will significantly improve university researchers' and students' ability to perform, enhance, and expand their current computationally-intensive research, prototyping, and development activities and will complement other investments already made, in-progress, or on the plan-of-record of UTC, including access to commercial cloud computing services. In addition to computer science and engineering, the UTC team anticipates significant research projects in mathematics, hydrology and computational fluid dynamics which will engage four regional partner universities. Two teaching projects address HPC education and use of HPC for mechanical engineering undergraduate research/design. In addition to these funded projects, merited additional research projects are enabled over time as the PIs, Central IT, and the cluster's Advisory Board attract and onboard additional researchers and students requiring HPC. Among other users are the more than 20 computational science Ph.D. students, plus several postdocs. Furthermore, SimCenter---UTC's research computing hub---supports undergraduate research through self-funding and REU in HPC, providing additional users for the proposed cluster. This award allows the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) to procure an innovative, 2,048-compute core, 16-server AMD EPYC2 cluster networked with 100Gbit/s InfiniBand plus 8TB of main memory and 77 Tflop/s of double-precision floating point arithmetic. EPYC2 Rome 7nm processors will be newly available at or near the start of the period of performance, so this project includes state-of-the-art, cost-effective, high-performance computing not previously possible using Intel or AMD processors. The university has invested in a "commodity" cluster as recently as three years ago, and it is heavily utilized by the existing user base. This system will be nearly four years old by the beginning of this proposed grant. By way of complement, upgrades to storage (1.1PB), internal networking, data center infrastructure, and private cloud virtualization (coming online by mid-2019) have prepared UTC to support a new campus-wide cluster with a growing number of users in addition to those named here. The proposed new campus cluster will enable core scales and total cluster memory not previously available on campus and thus help researchers prepare their scalable problem scenarios for greater scales on national resources such as XSEDE. Projects enabled immediately are 14 science driver projects (12 research, two teaching). Seven projects involve four regional partner universities. At least ten NSF grants at UTK, UTC, UAB, Tennessee Tech, and Ole Miss are enhanced. Project areas highlighted include fault-tolerant parallel computing, performance monitoring of HPC, next-generation parallel programming with MPI, special-purpose linear algebra, hydrology, and computational fluid dynamics research.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.