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Harbor Service, VAST Data Provide Boost for NCSA Systems 


An image of NCSA's Delta supercomputer. The supercomputer is wrapped in a colorful design, the word Delta shifts from violets to oranges and yellows, and triangular color shapes surround it.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications and VAST Data are giving supercomputing system Delta and the newly launched DeltaAI a boost in their storage and application performance.

NCSA launched Harbor, a service that provides very fast storage for global home and software directories across all NCSA open-science resources. Its deployment has led to a 400% increase in application launch performance for the Delta system, among many other gains.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant increase in GPU utilization from our Harbor users – and in that time, we’ve consolidated our file systems to a single VAST namespace, which has helped to ensure 100% uptime, improved application load times and provided a consistent, more interactive experience.

J.D. Maloney, NCSA Lead HPC Storage Engineer

To implement Harbor, Maloney and NCSA worked with VAST Data, which specializes in advanced artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Harbor and the VAST Data Platform have improved performance and data efficiency, streamlined operations and boosted scalability for future growth.

“With VAST, NCSA and its users now have access to advanced AI infrastructure that can expedite scientific research across every discipline, supporting their ability to process complex datasets, train AI models, and conduct high-performance simulations across various scientific domains,” said VAST Data Global Systems Engineering Lead Subramanian Kartik. “We are proud to be helping these organizations leverage AI to explore new scientific theories and solve complex problems faster and more efficiently.”

As the AI era continues to gain momentum, Delta and DeltaAI are poised to keep NCSA a leader in the field of research computing. Delta is the most performant graphics processing unit (GPU)-computing resource in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) portfolio, ideal for AI and machine learning applications with a focus on advancing accessibility for individuals with disabilities in high-performance computing. DeltaAI will quadruple NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expand the capacity available within the NSF-funded advanced computing ecosystem.

“DeltaAI will provide powerful capabilities for simulation and data science, with a strong emphasis on support for AI, which is in growing demand across many fields of science and engineering,” said NCSA Director Bill Gropp following the DeltaAI funding announcement.

Read more about the impact of Harbor in this VAST Data announcement and case study.


ABOUT DELTA COMPLEX

NCSA’s Delta Complex includes Delta and DeltaAI. Both resources are part of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem through the U.S. National Science FoundationACCESS 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.

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