A Georgia Tech team has received a $3.7 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation program to help cover the cost of a new high performance computing (HPC) resource for the upcoming Coda building’s data center.

The new HPC system, valued in total at $5.3 million, will support data-driven research in astrophysics, computational biology, health sciences, computational chemistry, discovery and acceleration of new and improved materials with linkage to manufacturing, and numerous other projects. It will also be used for research to improve the energy efficiency and performance of the HPC systems themselves. Research enabled by this new system will aid several national initiatives in big data, including strategic computing, materials genome, manufacturing partnerships, NSF-supported observatories such as the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, and the South Pole neutrino observatory known as IceCube.

The effort was led by Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Key contributing faculty in thrust areas of the award include Surya Kalidindi (Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Materials), Charles David Sherrill (School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Deirdre Shoemaker (School of Physics), Rich Vuduc (School of Computational Science and Engineering) and Marilyn Wolf (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering).

The proposed resources will affect dozens of faculty, also supporting the work of more than 50 research scientists and 200 graduate students. The materials science and manufacturing component of the proposal, led by Kalidindi, involved nine faculty contributors (A. Alexeev, C. Deo, H. Garmestani, A.S. Henry, S.R. Kalidindi, D.L. McDowell, D.S. Sholl, B. Wang, Y. Wang) and pointed to the work of 85 graduate students, the largest single application sector within the proposal.  The chemistry component of the proposal, led by C. David Sherill, also includes a computational materials chemistry component.

The system is anticipated to begin operations in 2019, and will surpass current campus capabilities. It will be used for applications that require large memories or local storage, provide modern GPU accelerators, and large storage capacity for data and simulation results.  IDEaS and many users of the new equipment will be based in Coda. System management will be handled by the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment, or PACE, also residing in Coda.

The MRI press release, with quotes from EVPR and Provost, can be found at:
http://ideas.gatech.edu/georgia-tech-award-equips-codas-data-center-new-supercomputer