URI is part of the Open Storage Network for research data storage and sharing

URI has been part of the National Science Foundation’s Open Storage Network (OSN) for 3 years. OSN is a collaborative between 17 top research institutions that is designed to storage vast amounts of valuable research data and allow for sharing over a high-speed network. Each institution has a storage “Pod” with over a petabyte of capacity. URI’s Pod is hosted in one of OSHEAN’s data centers that allows for extremely high-speed connectivity across the region and nationally.

More details available here: https://access-ci.org/open-storage-network-welcomes-new-campus-computing-partners/

Andromeda HPC cluster to merge into Unity HPC/AI system at MGHPCC

 

Andromeda–> Unity HPC Transition Plan

Over the last few years, we have built an entirely new HPC/AI environment, support system and infrastructure in partnership with UMass Amherst called UNITY: https://unity.uri.edu. We have received very positive feedback on Unity from all types of HPC/AI users at URI, and just performed a major upgrade to the system increasing capacity for URI users by ~50%. Unity is located at the MGHPCC, which is a cutting-edge near-zero Carbon facility specially designed for research computing by major research universities in our region. 

Andromeda is a much older computational resource sited at URI. It has an aging storage system, obsolete security infrastructure and consumes ~18 kW of energy that results in ~40 metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Moreover, our small support team at URI has difficulty with supporting 2 different major computational systems at multiple locations, especially given that we are in the process of building 2 additional systems (Sanctuary and Harmony) at MGHPCC.

For these reasons, we are considering transitioning URI users away from Andromeda to Unity over the next few months. Once the transition is complete, we will relocate viable Andromeda hardware and merge it into Unity so that there is minimal loss of compute capacity for URI. 

Here are the details of this transition plan: 

  • Our team will offer focussed support to Andromeda users to aid their transition to Unity over the next few months. 
  • Research data transfer to Unity would be the top priority right from the beginning. Since some data transfers may take a long time, we will not set a deadline for moving data off the NAS storage systems attached to Andromeda.  
  • After May 30th, we will shut down the Andromeda compute nodes thus halting the execution of any future jobs. And we will change the filesystem to read-only mode. Users would still be able to migrate their files over to Unity.
  • We will schedule a full shutdown of Andromeda at URI on July 1st. We will package and ship the viable Andromeda hardware to the MGHPCC and have it integrated into Unity and make it available by September 1st. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns.

Major Unity Upgrade!

We are pleased to announce that a major upgrade to our primary HPC/AI platform UNITY is finally complete! We have added:

1,000 CPU-cores: 16, 64-core CPU nodes that are identical to our current nodes in the uri-cpu partition.
24 AI GPUs: 4 nodes with 4 Nvidia L40S GPUs each; 2 nodes with 4 Nvidia H100 GPU nodes.

Moreover, snapshots are available for /project, in addition to /work and /home; so you can do file recovery. And there is 500TB more scratch space available at /scratch3. Finally, new documentation has been added with a new “Get Help” section.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance with these!

RICHAMP wins award at PEARC!

Received a wonderful note from Dr. Ginis: Pranav Sai received the award for the best abstract at PEARC24 held in Providence last summer. He presented RICHAMP and its implementation on URI nodes at MGHPCC for real-time storm forecasting. 

Quantum Computer at the MGHPCC!

The Healey-Driscoll administration has awarded nearly $5 million to establish the nation’s first Quantum Computing Complex at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke. Partnering with QuEra Computing Inc., the two-year project will deploy a state-of-the-art neutral atom quantum computer, facilitating open-access research, hardware innovation, and hands-on training for students.

The $16 million project is co-funded by $11 million in matching funds from QuEra. MGHPCC, with its experience in national computing infrastructure initiatives, will manage access to the QuEra System. The New England Research Cloud will make the quantum computer accessible to academic researchers.

 

Quantum Computing Comes to Holyoke

 

New Unity HPC/AI Quick Start Guide!

Unity is our primary HPC/AI computational platform at the Mass. Green HPC Center. It is an advanced and complex computing system that we are always trying to make more accessible to all types of users. While we have a very extensive set of new Unity documentation https://docs.unity.uri.edu/ we have now prepared a “Unity Quick Start” guide that is much shorter and may serve as an excellent “cheat sheet” of sorts. Please reach out to us, if you’d like to have a copy! 

MGHPCC and UNITY shutdown May 20 — 24th.

Just a reminder, there will be a UNITY HPC shutdown next week (May 20 — 24) to coincide with the annual MGHPCC shutdown. Please pay close attention to the messages being sent on this topic from the UNITY team. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions!