CC* Compute: A high-performance GPU cluster for accelerated research

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The exponential growth of computing power and the emergence of high-performance computing paradigms has revolutionized all fields of science and engineering. Graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware, a type of highly parallel co-processor originally designed for generating 3D scenes in video games, has been increasingly leveraged over the last decade to dramatically accelerate scientific computing workloads. This project is for the acquisition of a GPU compute cluster consisting of 24 state-of-the-art NVIDIA Tesla V100 32 GB GPUs with fast inter-GPU communication. The resource is housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and is accessible to researchers across campus and externally through a connection to the Pacific Research Platform/Nautilus federated systems network.Initial research activities on the facility span the computational realm, including: a new type of multi-scale molecular simulation for predicting structural and thermodynamic properties of complex polymeric solution formulations; a materials characterization thrust involving crystal orientation indexing with real-time instrument feedback control; and the development of a scalable Neural Architecture Search framework for automatic generation of Deep Neural Network models for scientific applications of machine learning. The cluster provides a significant resource for educating the next generation of computational scientists in the latest GPU-computing techniques. Undergraduates, high-school students, and K-12 teachers will also have access via existing campus-sponsored programs: Research Experience for Teachers (RET), California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP), and the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP). These programs serve to provide training and increase the number of under-represented students in STEM fields.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.