The University of California at San Diego will provide a ground-breaking new computing facility, Wildfire, that will be made available to the research community to both well established users of high end computing (HEC) and especially to new user communities that are less familiar with how HEC can advance their scientific and engineering goals. The distinguishing features of Wildfire are: (i) Deliver 1.8-2.0 Petaflop/s of long sought capacity for the 98% of XSEDE jobs (50% of XSEDE core hours) that use fewer than 1,000 cores and also support larger jobs. The exact number will depend on the speed of the processor being delivered by Intel but cannot be less that 1.8 Petaflop/s. (ii) Provide 7 PB of Lustre-based Performance Storage at 200 GB/s bandwidth for both scratch and allocated storage as well as 6 PB of Durable Storage (iii) Ensure high throughput and responsiveness using allocation/scheduling using proven policies on earlier deployed systems such as Trestles and Gordon (iv) Establish a rapid-access queue to provide new accounts within one day of the request (v) Enable community-supported custom software stacks via virtualization for communities that are unfamiliar with HPC environments. These virtual clusters will be able to perform at or near native InfinBand bandwidth/latency
Wildfire will provide novel approaches for resource allocation, scheduling, and user support, queues with quicker response for high-throughput computing, medium-term storage allocations, virtualized environments with customized software stack, dedicated allocations of physical/virtual machines, support for Science Gateways and bandwidth reservations on high-speed networks. Wildfire has been designed to efficiently serve the 98% of XSEDE jobs that need fewer than 1,000 cores, while also supporting larger jobs. The award leverages but also enhances the services available through the XSEDE project.
The Wildfire acquisition will work to increase the diversity of researchers able to effectively make use of advanced computational resources and establish a pipeline of potential users through virtualization, science gateways and educational activities focused on the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels.
