Continuing the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s work at the forefront of supercomputing innovation, the Center has several new systems coming online in 2022. Each represents a significant advance, targeting the specific needs of researchers, academics and corporate interests. Additionally, each provides specialization and cost-effectiveness in compute time and overall resource economy. They are Delta, Nightingale and HOLL-I.
Delta
With 2021’s retirement of NCSA’s powerhouse, Blue Waters, 2022 offers the launch of an all-new supercomputer housed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s National Petascale Computing Facility. Announced in 2021, Delta’s early user period begins soon, and we are looking forward to National Science Foundation acceptance. The first allocation period for Delta has passed, but allocations continue on schedule through XSEDE and the Illinois Allocation Request process. Delta offers a dedicated GPU (graphics processing unit) supercomputing experience. If you’ve been using only CPU and thinking that the GPU system architecture might be a more efficient data analysis methodology, the Delta team can help you make that transition.
Nightingale
NCSA is launching an exceptionally secure and user-friendly compute resource for analyzing sensitive data. Nightingale is a powerful HPC cluster that leverages capabilities provided to our clinical partners. Its massive storage and GPU/CPU infrastructure is Soc2-Type2-certified which means it’s compliant with the HIPAA privacy and security rules for using Protected Health Information and satisfies security policies for other controlled data such as FERPA, CUI and PII. NCSA’s professionals in Cybersecurity, Healthcare Innovation and User Services manage the complex security requirements and guide research teams through all of their compliance questions and onboarding steps, taking the burden from Nightingale users so they can focus on their research.
HOLL-I
HOLL-I (Highly Optimized Logical Learning Instrument) is designed to handle large-scale AI and machine-learning tasks. Paired with NCSA’s common storage system, TAIGA, HOLL-I users can enter and run jobs through an XRAS accelerator with Tensorflow and PyTorch frameworks. HOLL-I’s advantage as a dedicated resource for AI-related algorithms is unique in its Cerebras Systems CS-2 accelerator and systemic infrastructure. HOLL-I’s targeting offers higher-speed processing and is an economic choice for obtaining limited compute resources without allocation on other systems like HAL or Delta. Though similar to systems developed by other supercomputing centers, HOLL-I is unique in the AI computing space, putting NCSA at the forefront of artificial intelligence research.
Clowder 2.0
Since 2010, Clowder, an open-source data management framework for research has been working steadily with researchers to create gateways for scientific data management. The success of Clowder has led to projects like the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, and partnerships with agricultural powerhouse Syngenta. At the time of Clowder’s creation, NCSA’s software team wrote the codebase in Scala, a programming language widely used to build distributed systems, capable of running on the highly performant Java Virtual Machine, and able to leverage the large Java ecosystem. For Clowder v2, the core of the framework has been rewritten in Python and Reactjs to reach a wider audience of contributors. This change will enable the Clowder team to keep the software more easily up to date, including its libraries and other dependencies.
iForge to vForge
Responding to the needs of an ever-changing Industry Partners group, in 2022, iForge will be migrating to virtual machines through the use of NCSA’s Radiant platform. Leaner and more targeted, vForge will continue to serve the same uses as iForge, while allowing NCSA to use on-site resources for upwards-scaling projects. Plans for the data migration to TAIGA and vForge for existing iForge projects are being developed and minimal disruption is expected. Another competitive aspect of the shift to vForge allows data created and stored on TAIGA to be used more easily across NCSA clusters that have access to the storage system. Similar standards will apply for login and data transfer while the GUI using Open on Demand will remain. The new system should be in production by mid-to-late summer.