Research IT's new BRC HPC Condo Cluster service offering has gotten off to a roaring start. The new service, officially launched on May 22 at a special event held at Sutardja Dai Hall, allows faculty and principal investigators to purchase compute nodes (individual servers) from their grants or other available funds, to add to campus' new compute cluster SAVIO. Researchers buying into the system receive free cluster support and priority access to their compute contributions in exchange for their excess or unused compute cycles. Since the launch, the program has gained enough faculty and researcher equipment contributions to over double the initial size of SAVIO. With these contributions, the SAVIO will be a 160-node, 3200 processor core Linux cluster with a peak performance rating of 66 Teraflops. And it will continue to grow as faculty discover it to be an attractive way to purchase compute resources to accomplish research without having to worry about the hassles of building and supporting these systems. Already, the BRC HPC program has received contributions and/or commmitments from a number of research groups including Physics, Theoretical Astrophyics Center, Berkeley Astronomy, Geography, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Atmospheric Sciences,Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Political Science and Statistics, Nuclear Engineering, and Molecular and Cell Biology. As the program grows, we intend to expand the services and features of the offering to provide more capability. Immediate plans include the doubling in size of the parallel filesystem and the addition of a Data Transfer Node connected to the campus' new Science DMZ 10GBE network connection to the outside - both of these features are being implemented to facilitate research with Big Data needs. Researchers thinking about purchasing a Linux cluster to meet their computational needs might want to consider this new program. Interested parties should contact BRC HPC Services Manager Gary Jung to find out more.
August 25, 2014