This is an award to acquire a compute cluster at LSU. The computer is a heterogeneous HPC cluster named SuperMIC containing both Intel Xeon Phi and NVIDIA Kepler K20X GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators. The intent is to conduct research on programming such clusters while advancing projects that are dependent on HPC. The efforts range from modeling conditions which threaten coastal environments and test mitigation techniques; to simulating the motions of tumors/organs in cancer patients due to respiratory actions to aid radiotherapy planning and management. The burden of learning highly complex hybrid programming models presents an enormous software development crisis and demands a better solution. SuperMIC will serve as the development platform to extend current programming frameworks, such as Cactus, by incorporating GPU and Xeon Phi methods. Such frameworks allow users to move seamlessly from serial to multi-core to distributed parallel platforms without changing their applications, and yet achieve high performance. The SuperMIC project will include training and education at all levels, from a Beowulf boot camp for high school students to more than 20 annual LSU workshops and computational sciences distance learning courses for students at LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative) and LA-SiGMA (Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Applications) member institutions. These include Southern University, Xavier University, and Grambling State University - all historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) which have large underrepresented minority enrollments. The SuperMIC cluster will be used in the LSU and LA-SiGMA REU and RET programs. It will impact the national HPC community through resources committed to the NSF XSEDE program and the Southeastern Universities Research Association SURAgrid. The SuperMIC will commit 40% of the usage of the machine to the XSEDE XRAC allocation committee.
