This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Building on the success of a previousMRI-funded project, an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, psychologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists at the University of Oregon is acquiring a large-scale computational resource, the Applied Computational Instrument for Scientific Synthesis (ACISS), to support continued cutting-edge scientific research in these areas. The ACISS hardware will consist of general purpose multicore computing nodes, high performance computing nodes augmented with GPGPU acceleration, a 400TB storage system, high-bandwidth networking infrastructure and additional computing resources that will be incorporated into an existing visualization lab in the Department of Computer and Information Science. A key part of the proposed infrastructure is the unique opportunity to manage ACISS as a computational science cloud.
The ACISS infrastructure will allow an expanded the scope for the current projects in the areas of software tools for performance measurement, programming environments and languages for describing and executing complex simulations and scientific work flows, new algorithms for multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic inference and undertake new projects in support of the domain sciences. Research projects that will benefit include: a) modeling neural networks in C. elegans to better understand the neural mechanisms responsible for chemotaxis and klinotaxis, and investigation of the evolution of genes involved in development and their role in speciation and phenotypic variation; b) development of neuroinformatic techniques used in brain imaging and analysis, integrating structural information from fMRI and other sources with EEG data; c) molecular modeling research, including the definition of new techniques for meso-scale modeling and applying computational methods to understand phase transitions and nitrogen fixation; d) astrophysical simulations of turbulent plasma flows that influence the early stages of planet formation.
The ACISS infrastructure will provide the computational resources necessary for future multidisciplinary research. ACISS will establish a novel paradigm for computational science research and practice. The experience gained in early adoption of the ACISS cloud computing technologies will allow us to more rapidly apply this knowledge to create new scientific work flows, more productive research collaborations, and enhanced multidisciplinary education programs. Farther reaching, ACISS can be seen as a model for translational computational science, in which ACISS-based services function as cyber-incubators where new work flows for scientific research are prototyped.
The University of Oregon (UO) received a Major Research Instrumentation(MRI) grant from the NSF to build a state-of-the-art, large-scalecomputational and storage resource in support of multi-disciplinaryscientific research. The "Applied Computational Instrument for ScientificSynthesis" (ACISS) is a heterogeneous platform created to meet requirementsfrom a diverse set of research projects in multiple disciplines, includingthose proposed in chemisty, biology, neuroscience, and computer science.In addition to delivering high-performance computing (HPC) resources for UOresearch, the ACISS project addressed systems administration issues bymanaging the ACISS machine as a "science cloud" for computational,informatics, and data sciences. UO purchased the ACISS system from the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Corporation atthe end of Year 1 of the project. The procurement consisted of three typesof compute nodes (basic, fat, GPU), a large-volume storage system, and ahigh-performance interconnect. The "basic" nodes consisted of a total of1,536 cores and were targeted for applications requiring higherparallelism. Each of the 16 "fat" nodes contained 32 cores and 384 GB pernode. They were intended for applications needing large amounts of sharedmemory on a single node. The 52 "GPU" nodes added 624 extra (basic) cores,together with 3 NVidia M2070 graphics processing units (GPUs) per node (156GPUs total). UO invested significantly in remodeling its Computing Centerto provide HPC support in the machine room where ACISS presently resides.During the last period of the MRI grant, final purchases were made ofvisualization equipment for the Department of Computer and InformationScience (CIS) visualization laboratory (Viz Lab) and the NeuroinformaticsCenter (NIC) conference room. Four Sony laser projectors were purchasedfor the CIS Viz Lab and will be used to create a high-resolution display.Four Sony 4K monitors were purchased for the NIC conference room. The ACISS project has been an outstanding success for the University ofOregon, not only to the research projects described originally in the MRIproposal, but to the broader UO community of researchers in a variety offields. All of the MRI proposed objectives been met and the ACISS machineresource has now transitioned into a production phase. Over 380 faculty,scientists, and graduate students across the UO use ACISS for research andeducation. In addition to the machine room remodeling, the UO College ofArts and Sciences (CAS) has invested in 3 scientific programmers to supportACISS and its IT group (call CASIT) is continuing to manage the ACISSresource. Other jobs created include a full-time ACISS systemsadministrator and a half-time cloud technical lead. The NSF MRI award andACISS project have been important for the development of high-performancecomputational and information science resources at the University ofOregon, as well as helping to understand how to best support UOresearch computing for the future.
