NSF MRI Program Funds IACS Cluster Replacement

IACS will soon be expanding the SeaWulf cluster, a computing resource that has grown to be an essential part of scholarship and research campus wide, via new NSF Award #2215987. The Team, led by IACS Director Robert Harrison, Deputy Director Alan Calder, Lead Research Scientist Eva Siegmann, and DoIT’s Assistant Vice President/Chief Research Information Officer, David Cyrille, also won matching funds from the Empire State Development's Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR). 

SBU researchers have relied on SeaWulf (which was also funded by NSF, Award #1531492, with NYSTAR matching funds) to power approximately $420M in federally-funded projects, producing over 2,500 publications. However, many scientific and engineering applications important to NSF and our campus are bandwidth-limited, and SeaWulf’s conventional DDR memory technology simply cannot scale to saturate even a fraction of the cores within modern servers.  The new cluster will provide greater capacity, more than doubling the theoretical peak floating-point performance of the current SeaWulf’s SBU x86 architecture compute power - and nearly quadrupling the aggregate memory bandwidth. The result is that, for bandwidth-intensive applications, the new system will deliver from 4- to 8-fold faster speeds compared to (at this writing, December 2022)  the very best current (Intel) Ice Lake nodes - and over 10-fold compared to the (SW) Haswell nodes.

HPC Architect Firat Coskun is assembling the system with the assistance of Sr. HPC Engineer Dan Wood and Sr. Research Systems Administrator Raul Gonzalez. The combination of massive memory and communication bandwidths will massively enhance the performance of applications as they scale within a node and beyond. Together with substantial memory capacity, this new resource will be unique within the NSF cyber ecosystem. The system will be available to all SBU faculty, students (with faculty approval), their external collaborators, regional colleges including 4-year schools, K12 schools through summer schools and teacher training. Additionally, NYSTAR funding will also enable small businesses to have access to the cluster.