URI – MGHPCC Partnership – Information Technology Services

The Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is a collaboration of the five major research universities in Massachusetts including Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern and UMass. The collaboration built a dedicated data center in 2012 located in Holyoke, MA that hosts the research computing infrastructure of these universities. In addition, the MGHPCC also leads other activities that enhance research computing in the region including submitting collaborative grant proposals, running regional workshops, maintaining a presence at international supercomputing conferences, and more.

As of October 2021, URI has formalized a partnership with the MGHPCC as part of President Parlange’s strategic investments towards advancing research at the university. Not only does a partnership with the MGHPCC help URI computational researchers benefit from access to the vast and world-class computational resources available, there would also be the potential for broadening research collaborations between Rhode Island and Massachusetts universities, including the submission of new collaborative proposals for funding to several federal agencies.

URI has been collaborating with the center and its member institutions, launching a number of projects allowing URI researchers to make use of key computational facilities. URI has also installed $2+ million worth of new high performance computing hardware, and operating it jointly with UMass Amherst’s research computing systems. This serves as a computational platform enabling new regional research collaborations. Additional details are available below.

UMass – URI collaboration :: UNITY cluster

All computational researchers at URI have access to the UNITY cluster. The UNITY cluster is a collaborative system being built and operated jointly by UMass and URI. It currently has ~300 nodes with ~20,000 CPU-cores and ~1,500 GPUs for supporting a wide variety of HPC/AI applications. Significant growth is projected very shortly due to major investments underway. Access to URI researchers has been enabled through the InCommon Federation.

MIT – URI collaboration :: SuperCloud

Research groups at URI have access to the MIT Lincoln Labs “SuperCloud” resource. Details of the cluster may be found at the SuperCloud cluster portal. The cluster currently has 400+ nodes with 48 Intel Xeon cores with 192GB memory and also offers 200+ nodes, each with 40 Intel Xeon cores, 2 Nvidia V100 GPGPUs and 384GB memory. Access to URI researchers has been enabled through the InCommon Federation.

Harvard/BU – URI collaboration :: NESE

The North-East Storage Exchange (NESE) is a regional storage collaboration funded by NSF hosted at the MGHPCC and managed by Harvard/BU. URI researchers have access this facility for their data storage and archival needs via the UNITY HPC/AI cluster.

OpenStorageNetwork – URI collaboration :: OSN Pod

The OpenStorageNetwork (OSN) is a distributed storage collaboration funded by NSF, with a node hosted at the MGHPCC. URI owns a 1 PB node hosted at the OSHEAN Data Center in Boston. URI researchers have access to this facility for their active research data storage and sharing needs. Access to URI researchers is enabled through the InCommon Federation authentication.

Harvard/BU – URI collaboration :: NERC

The New England Research Cloud (NERC) is a project led by Boston University and Harvard that offers Cloud computing services to MGHPCC members for research use. Access to URI researchers is enabled through the InCommon Federation.

High-speed connectivity :: OSHEAN & UMassNet

URI is connected to the MGHPCC via a high-speed 10 Gbps fiber link via a collaboration between OSHEAN and UMassNet.

For questions about any of these programs, please contact Dr. Gaurav Khanna, Director of Research Computing at URI. Email us at itrcs-group@uri.edu with questions, comments, suggestions — anything!

URI – MGHPCC Partnership