The 7th Annual Meeting on High Performance Computing and Infrastructure in Norway

NOTUR2008 - ABSTRACTS

Campus Level Research Computing Infrastructure: A Critical Component for a Successful and Sustainable National Cyberinfrastructure

Jan E. Ødegård

At a time when a number of U.S. federal funding agencies have made, or are making, substantial investments in "open" national cyberinfrastructure the pressure to invest, support and maintain complementary campus level resources (on-ramps) is growing. As an example, the NSF TeraGrid will, by 2011, deliver computing capacity that aggregate to several PetaFLOPS and hundreds-thousands of millions of CPU hours annually. The first NSF Track 2 system, Ranger, deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at University of Texas, went into production in early 2008 and is rated at 504 TeraFLOPS and the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory system Kraken will be in production later this fall. Blue Waters, the NSF Track 1 award, will be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a sustained performance of multiple PetaFLOPS on real applications. To effectively leverage such computing power, it is critical that universities develop and support local computing resources for code development and training. This specialized training is crucial for preparing the next generation computational science and engineering workforce.

With the increasing focus on high-end computing at the national level and computing recognized as the third pillar of scientific discovery, local needs for access to managed Cyberinfrastructure is growing. The local need ranges from entry level computing cluster to data storage and visualization managed by professional support staff. In this presentation the focus will be on how Rice University approaches this growing local need.

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