CC* Compute: GPU HPC Cluster Partition for Research, Education, and Student Success

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Oral Roberts University aims to deploy a GPU-based server partition called Eli, and integrate it with Titan, a campus wide resource. Eli will address the GPU and storage needs of computing for research, research training, and education. The proposed hardware is 6 GPU Compute Nodes with 2 Intel 32-Core Xeon Gold CPUs having 16 x 32G DRAM, 4 NVIDIA Tesla A30 GPUs, 1 SATA SSD boot drive (960GB) and 2 NVMe Solid State Drives (4TB each). It also includes a meta data Server, storage server, and NFS node.This project addresses two areas of improvement in the Oral Roberts University (ORU) Research Computing and Analytics (ORCA) facility, providing GPU resources and adding much needed parallel file system (PFS) resources. These new resources are deployed as a third cluster partition, named Eli, in ORCA’s existing Titan cluster. Along with Eli’s 100/200Gb HDR InfiniBand fabric, the Eli PFS supports native communication from each of Titan’s other partitions with 100GbE OmniPath and 40GbE QDR InfiniBand. Eli’s GPU nodes has potential to address a local and regional void of GPU capacity for traditional HPC codes (especially VASP and GAMESS) as well as emerging Data Science codes. VASP and GAMESS consume many core hours. The GPUs will accelerate these efforts while freeing previously used resources to other applications. With ORU’s Data Science degree concentrations, nearly half of the new ORU research efforts are Data Science related, driving demand for tools such as TensorFlow and Natural Language Processing tools. Eli’s PFS provides the much-needed capacity and performance to support the existing and emerging science drivers. While serving ORCA’s current users, Eli’s augmentation of Titan provides new researchers additional motivation to embrace HPC/AI methods. Titan/Eli is freely available for use by all Oklahoma academic institutions. The ORCA management team actively evangelizes HPC/AI to nascent researchers and provides opportunities for substantial undergraduate research experiences. Success is measured by system utilization, availability, and increased researcher participation. This project aligns with ORU’s NSF CC*-funded 100GbE connectivity to the OneOklahoma Friction Free Network (OFFN), a science DMZ for 19 Oklahoma academic institutions and is funded through the collaborative efforts of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.