The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of five institutions assisting a new national initiative headed by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to “create a unified environment for research computing, data and scientific applications across several U.S. National Science Foundation-supported national computing centers and two cloud platforms.”
The Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab) will create a single, browser-based environment for interactive computing across these centers, making high-performance computing even more accessible and aligning with the ongoing efforts of other NSF programs such as ACCESS and NAIRR. iDLab will supplant the current command-line interface, which requires more technical expertise than some potential users possess.
“iDLab will serve as a front door, providing interactive access to the computing and research data capabilities of participating national computing centers,” said Amit Chourasia, principal investigator of the iDLab project and chief research data architect in UCLA’s Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC).
The new, simple entry point for advanced computing resources aims to broaden access to new users across all research disciplines, not just those in technical and STEM fields. iDLab will also have a catalog of data sets and applications available for researchers to use.
As a partner in this $9 million NSF award, NCSA is contributing to site integration and operations for its NSF-funded Delta and DeltaAI systems.
“Joining this new venture of the iDLab aligns seamlessly with the mission of Delta, DeltaAI and NCSA to bring advanced computing resources to the whole of the research community,” said Brett Bode, deputy project director for Delta and DeltaAI, and iDLab co-principal investigator. “We’re excited to work with our colleagues at UCLA and the other supercomputing centers to provide researchers with an intuitive and interactive tool to push innovation and strengthen their work.”
For more information on the launch of iDLab, check out the press release from UCLA.
ABOUT DELTA AND DELTAAI
NCSA’s Delta and DeltaAI are part of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem through the U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS program. Delta (OAC 2005572) is a powerful computing and data-analysis resource combining next-generation processor architectures and NVIDIA graphics processors with forward-looking user interfaces and file systems. The Delta project partners with the Science Gateways Community Institute to empower broad communities of researchers to easily access Delta and with the University of Illinois Division of Disability Resources & Educational Services and the School of Information Sciences to explore and reduce barriers to access. DeltaAI (OAC 2320345) maximizes the output of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research. Tripling NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expanding the capacity available within ACCESS, DeltaAI enables researchers to address the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI/ML and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data. Additional funding for DeltaAI comes from the State of Illinois.