The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $10 million to the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University (IU) in collaboration with University of Hawaiʻi, University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Arizona State University (ASU) and Cornell University to deploy Jetstream 2, a nationwide distributed cloud computing system that supports on-demand research, artificial intelligence (AI) and enhanced large-scale data analysis.
“We are delighted and honored to be part of the Jetstream 2 project with a remarkable team of national collaborators,” said UH President David Lassner. “The focus on artificial intelligence and deep machine learning to support data-intensive scholarship will directly advance our research enterprise, educational opportunities for our students, and our work to diversify Hawaiʻi’s economy.”
Jetstream 2, an infrastructure project that will provide an 8 petaFLOPS (a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second) cloud computing system is designed to meet the growing needs of national science and engineering communities.
Consisting of five computational systems, Jetstream 2’s primary system will be located at IU, with four smaller regional systems deployed nationwide at partners ASU, Cornell, UH and TACC. Jetstream 2 will enable thousands of scientific products from a diverse group of scientists in need of interactive and on-demand computing rather than batch-style computation. In addition, Jetstream 2 makes high-performance computing and software more accessible to researchers, especially those from smaller academic communities with limited access to resources and less experience using supercomputing systems.
The new Jetstream 2 resources will be maintained by UH Information Technology Services Cyberinfrastructure and will empower research in the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute and across all 10 UH campuses.
“Jetstream 2 empowers our University of Hawaiʻi community of researchers, faculty and students with access to the highest tiers of NSF’s national computing ecosystem, effectively democratizing access to these highly specialized, high-performance computing resources,” said UH Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Garret Yoshimi. “We look forward to leveraging the access afforded by Jetstream 2 to ensure our community can effectively collaborate with their peers across the nation, not simply from an on-ramp to the national computing ecosystem, but directly accessing the core infrastructure as if it were ‘local’ to our community.”
