Elise Miller-Hooks, Professor, Bill and Eleanor Hazel Chair, Infrastructure Engineering, Civil, Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering, Maria Emelianenko, Professor, Mathematical Sciences, Yue Cheng, Associate Professor, Computer Science, Jayshree Sarma, Director, Office of Research Computing, Research and Innovation Initiatives, and Shobita Satyapal, Professor, Physics and Astronomy, will receive funding next month from the National Science Foundation to acquire a reconfigurable and agile computing system.
This project will acquire, install, and deploy a reconfigurable computer system, named Gunston, to meet the growing and changing needs of both traditional and non-traditional high performance computing (HPC) researchers at Mason. Gunston will be managed centrally but shared with the entire Mason research community. The goal of this effort is to satisfy the computational needs in diverse areas of scientific research and education.
The proposed system is based on OpenStack architecture and will be reconfigurable to support the different types of research needs of users at Mason. Gunston will consist of standard compute nodes, high memory nodes, and graphics processing unit (GPU) nodes connected through Infiniband switches to support low-latency, high-bandwidth communication between nodes to support the workloads. Gunston will have both the traditional HPC and virtualized environments. The virtualized environment will allow researchers to work interactively with their own set of tools to perform their research.
The researchers will receive $750,000 from NSF for this effort. Funding will begin in August 2020 and will end in late July 2023.
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