Restart of the UIC HPC Partnership program – Call for new resource allocations
Dear Colleagues,
ACER is happy to announce the restart of the HPC Partnership (A.K.A. Condo) Program, made possible by UIC leadership under the Forward Initiative Program. To kick off this program, we are now taking requests for hardware allocations on a new, state-of-the-art HPC cluster, scheduled to go online this Summer. After this initial call, additional calls for hardware will be made twice a year at the starts of the Fall and Spring semesters. This new cluster will replace our aging and out-of-warranty Extreme cluster, which will be decommissioned at the end of the year. More details regarding the decommissioning of Extreme and migrating to the new cluster will be made available in the middle of February 2023. The new HPC cluster will be housed at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) in Champaign-Urbana to take advantage of the site’s power infrastructure.
The first generation of nodes available for purchase on the new machine will feature two 32-core Intel 8358 (Ice Lake) Platinum Processors — more than double the number of cores available on most Extreme nodes. The base memory on each node is 256 GB. Nodes with 1 and 4 TB of memory are also available. Researchers will also have the option to purchase GPU-accelerated nodes equipped with quad NVIDIA A100 co-processors. A 100 GB/s InfiniBand network will provide the communications infrastructure between nodes. The cluster will also feature a new 3,000 TB GPFS storage system. While all the component hardware is significantly advanced compared to the hardware on Extreme, the entry level buy-in for the new cluster is comparable to the old buy-in cost for Extreme. Additional details regarding the hardware specifications and cost of the nodes can be found in the HPC Partnership section on ACER’s Resource Pricing webpage.
If you are interested in participating in this round of hardware purchases, please fill out the request form by visiting High-Performance Research Computing and clicking on the “Request HPC Resources” button. The deadline for node purchases in Spring 2023 is Friday, April 28. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at acer@uic.edu.
Best regards,
ACER Team