The University of Hawaiʻi’s Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute (HIDSI) recently received the first of three shipments of equipment that will add advanced computing resources to Mana, the high performance computing (HPC) cluster that serves all 10 UH campuses.
The three servers and 24 central processing unit (CPU) nodes delivered from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) total 1,104 CPU cores and 24 graphics processing units (GPUs). Currently, 30 nodes have been installed, and initial testing is taking place.
The equipment was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation (NSF MRI) award program, which provides support to acquire instrumentation necessary for advances in fundamental science and engineering research.
“We are thankful that this NSF MRI award has enabled us to add significant, state-of-the-art capacity to the University of Hawaiʻi’s Mana HPC cluster,” said Vice President for Information Technology and CIO Garret Yoshimi. “The enhanced and expanded capacity will allow us to better serve our community of researchers, together with their global partners, as they take on the challenges of our modern world.”
The 1,200% increase of GPUs allows for a variety of applications, including machine learning, data science and molecular dynamics. The CPU core count has also increased by 29% from the existing 3,820 core community nodes which support high throughput computation. The new resources are networked with the latest generation of high dynamic range Infiniband and supports multi-node message passing interface applications.
The second shipment of equipment will include Cray ClusterStor E1000, an all flash storage system running the Lustre parallel file system with 92 terabytes of raw capacity. This equipment will provide faster, high performance computing storage, suitable for the unique storage demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning. According to HPE, one Cray ClusterStor E1000 rack could download all movies on Netflix U.S. in 20 seconds, and complete one input/output operation for every person in Texas in 1 second.
Mana’s new HPC resources are anticipated to be available to the UH community as early as November 1. Updates on the status of Mana’s new equipment are made regularly at the HIDSI website.
—By Maria E. Dumanlang
