HPCI Center Overview
Many of our most important engineering and scientific problems today require the ability to manage ever-growing volumes of data and to evaluate increasingly complex computational models. Developing solutions for greater processing capacity has thus become critical to progress in an increasing number of fields.
By using systems of interconnected computer clusters and the concept of parallel computing to distribute tasks over multiple processors at once, high performance computing makes it possible to tackle single problems with unprecedented computing power. Not only does it enable researchers to perform existing operations much faster and in greater volume than ever before, but also to solve problems so complex they would be unfeasible without the capabilities of high-volume parallel processing.
The High Performance Computing Initiative at ASU
The Ira A. Fulton School High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI) at Arizona State University offers world-class high performance computing to the school's researchers and their industrial partners. The HPCI's mission is to be:
- A center for best practice in the support of, application of, and education in cluster computers for high performance scientific computing.
- A hub for collaborative science and engineering, where novel use of high performance scientific computing leads to new innovation and accelerated scientific progress.
- A center for research in new ideas in the architectures, operating systems, and applications of high performance computer systems.
The US Council on Competitiveness, in recognizing the significance of high-performance computing to modern product design, has declared in the global marketplace, "to out-compete is to out-compute." High Performance Computing is a focus at every national lab, every university, and most of the Fortune 500. However, many high performance computing centers run below capacity, largely due to a lack of qualified users and operators.
The Fulton HPCI meets these challenges by being one of the first supercomputer facilities focused on the integration of undergraduate education with high performance computing to produce the next generation of engineering research leaders fluent in computational science. The HPCI now has more than 500 users on it's primary systems, and is committed to maximizing the science impact of high performance computing.
Facilities
The HPCI main facility supports more computing power per square foot than virtually any other university facility (at the time of it's 2005 construction); 750,000 watts in only 1,200 sq. feet. Most academic computing centers are limited in growth by their cooling capacity. The Fulton HPCI has constructed machine room facilities with innovative new cooling technologies, which will provide available thermal capacity far beyond what is available at any other university today.
Currently, the HPCI facilities host more than 5,000 processor cores, each as fast as or faster than a single top-of-the-line desktop computer. The facility's central computing cluster, Saguaro, is capable of sustained performance of more than thirty trillion computations per second (30 teraflops). In addition, more than 1 petabyte of disk storage sits on the HPCI floor, providing both high performance and archival data storage to the ASU research community.
Services
The HPCI offers a complete set of Cyberinfrastructure Services necessary for the modern practice of computational science and engineering. The services offered by the HPCI to researchers, students, and industrial partners include:
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CORE HARDWARE SERVICES:
- Cycles - Access to computing power on a variety of high performance platforms.
- Storage - Both short term and long term data storage, scaling into the petabytes
- Virtual Servers - Instances of virtual machines for providing long term persistent services.
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PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
- Application Porting - Professional assistance in converting codes to run on large scale HPC resources
- Scripting, Workflow, and Data Management - Programmers to provide aid in automating the scientific process
- Software Development - Ground up design of software to meet your scientific needs, including creation of web gateways for broad access.
- Training
- Proposal Support - Assistance preparing proposals for projects which involve use of HPC and other CyberInfrastructure
- National Supercomputing Center Allocation Requests - Assistance preparing requests for access to TeraGrid, DOE, DOD, and NASA resources.
For more information on any HPCI professional services, please contact Gil Speyer on the applications team.
