TACC’s Frontera HPC System Expansion for ‘Urgent Computing’ – COVID-19, Hurricanes, Earthquakes

Frontera, deployed at Texas’ Advanced Computing Center and the ninth fastest HPC system in the world, will receive an expansion to support urgent computing and basic sciences, according to TACC.

The expansion is funded by an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a contribution from Dell Giving, Dell Technologies’ philanthropic arm. The expansion adds 396 Dell R640 server nodes in 11 shelves, as well as Nvidia / Mellanox InfiniBand HDR cards and switches to connect to the Frontera’s high-speed fabric. Each node contains 56 Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 (“Cascade Lake”) processors and 192GB of DDR-4 memory – the same as Frontera’s current node configuration of 8008 compute nodes.

The new device will be available to researchers in January. The expansion will add approximately 3.5 million node hours of computing time annually to the 70 million hours available on Frontera. Use of the system is determined by a peer review committee based on the project’s need for extremely large-scale computing, and the ability to efficiently use the supercomputer on the Frontera scale.

TACC said the NSF award will allow the academic community to double its use of Longhorn, a subsystem of Frontera built in partnership with IBM and Nvidia to support deep learning workloads. Longhorn is currently used by university researchers, government agencies, and industry partners of TACC.

This year’s TACC’s urgent computing capabilities were used for the COVID-19 crisis and for the record hurricane season. In the coming years, it will also support responses to emergencies such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and other large-scale disasters, according to the TACC.

“This supplemental award from the National Science Foundation and a generous gift from Dell allows us to continue to support researchers in responding to national and global emergencies, without sacrificing the basic science for which the Frontera system was built,” said Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of TACC.

“NSF is pleased that the Foundation’s investments in electronic infrastructure, including those in TACC, have been mobilized quickly and successfully to meet urgent national needs without sacrificing our commitment to support long-term basic research on behalf of the nation’s future” of the NSF Office of Cyber ​​Infrastructure Manish Parashar developed.

The simulation performed by the University of California, San Francisco’s Amaro Laboratory on Frontera, shows the atomic structure of the diabetes shield of the Coronavirus. Credit: Lorenzo Casalino (UCSD) et al.

Time devoted to advanced computing systems for emergency response and operations is rare outside of supercomputers run by mission-driven agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the United States Geological Survey.

In the early stages of the pandemic, the TACC dedicated more than 30 percent of its computing resources to support COVID-19 research, enabling more than 50 teams to explore the virus in ways that would not otherwise be possible. This work is expected to continue in the coming years.

TACC said that during the last hurricane season, TACC stopped work on its systems 10 times to produce emergency storm surge simulations of hurricanes landing in the Gulf of Mexico, information shared with emergency managers and first responders in the region.

TACC has supported urgent computing efforts since 2003, when TACC resources were used to direct investigators to debris from the space shuttle Challenger in East Texas. During Hurricanes Ike and Harvey, the oil spill in Deepwater Horizon, and earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti and Japan, TACC responded to the call for emergency account resources. Expanding Frontera would make more of these humanitarian efforts possible without displacing other important scientific work.

In the 14 months that have elapsed since TACC deployed Frontera, the system enabled the first comprehensive atom simulations of the COVID-19 protein spike; The discovery of a group of 250 previously unknown stars in our galaxy born elsewhere; First-ever predictions of gravitational waves from the merger of black holes with a large mass ratio; The largest and most realistic tornado simulation ever.

Source: Andrew Dubrow, TACC

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