ACADEMIA

The University of Central Oklahoma’s Center for Research and Education in Interdisciplinary Computation (CREIC) has selected Advanced Clustering Technologies to build a high performance cluster computing system.

The University of Central Oklahoma’s Center for Research and Education in Interdisciplinary Computation (CREIC) has selected Advanced Clustering Technologies to build a cluster supercomputer to be named “Buddy” in honor of the university’s mascot, Buddy Bronco.

The supercomputer project is being funded by a $304,745 research grant CREIC was awarded last year by the National Science Foundation. The “Buddy” supercomputer will support research and education for students, faculty and staff at the university, as well as researchers across the state.

“This cluster is the cornerstone of our mission to transform the research computing infrastructure at the university,” said Evan Lemley, who is the director of CREIC and will serve as the lead researcher on the project. “We’ll be able to meet the growing needs for high performance computing resources for student-centered research and education at the University of Central Oklahoma and other institutions in Oklahoma.”

“Buddy” will be built using Advanced Clustering’s Pinnacle Flex architecture, which is designed with performance, efficiency, flexibility and upgradeability in mind. Pinnacle Flex, which offers multiple configuration options to meet the most demanding computing needs, use servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family.

The cluster’s aggregate peak speed is 32 TFLOPs. Dedicated GPU and Phi nodes will help researchers accelerate their code, and high memory nodes will facilitate bioinformatics and genomics research. Advanced Clustering’s online job submission tool, eQUEUE, not only enables batch job submissions, it also supports interactive GUI applications and remote visualization and provides detailed analytics and reporting to better manage the cluster and its users.

“We’re excited to be working with Evan and his team on the ‘Buddy’ supercomputer, which will give scientists and researchers a tremendous boost to their respective projects,” said Jim Paugh, Director of Sales at Advanced Clustering. “Our system will not only enable research projects at the university and across the state of Oklahoma, it will also give the university the tools it needs to bring more users to the cluster.”