This project will create a big data cloud infrastructure, the Kentucky Research Informatics Cloud (KyRIC), to accelerate data-driven discovery and computational research education across multiple disciplines. Scientific discovery today is being enabled through computational and data intensive research that exploits enormous amounts of available data. KyRIC will advance a number of exciting research programs across many disciplines, such as Bioinformatics and System Biology Algorithms, Large Graph and Evolutionary Network Analysis, Image Processing, and Computational Modeling and Simulation. Breakthroughs in KyRIC-enabled research will have important societal benefits in a number of areas, such as increasing agricultural yields, improving economic competitiveness, and creating new products and markets.
KyRIC will use a hybrid architecture to support massively parallel applications that will address exciting and challenging new data and memory intensive research in big data science. The KyRIC hybrid system will consists of two subsystems: a 50 nodes cluster, each with 4 10-core processors, 3TB RAM, and an 8TB SSD array; and a Peta-scale storage system providing 2 PB of object-based storage. KyRIC will employ leading-edge cloud management software that will allow nodes to be reconfigured, scheduled, and loaded with problem-specific applications software based on the current mix of big data jobs being executed by users. As a result, the project will enable and support a wide range of new research activities, each with its own unique characteristics that are beyond the capacity of our existing infrastructure. KyRIC will be readily accessed by researchers across the state utilizing our latest high-performance network, with multiple 100GB/s links from Lexington to Louisville and Cincinnati. KyRIC will also join XSEDE to better integrate the University of Kentucky (UK) with national multi-petascale capabilities.
KyRIC will provide intuitive access, rapid infrastructure customizations, and higher bandwidth and lower latency between the desktop and resources like XSEDE to facilite improved algorithm design, software development, and interactive data analysis. KyRIC will be used by over 1000 UK researchers (faculty, staff, and students) and by computational research collaborators across the state of Kentucky, notably University of Louisville (UL), Northern Kentucky University (NKU), and Kentucky State University (KSU). The resource will make exciting data-intensive projects possible, enhance computational research education for graduate and undergraduate students, help attract and retain talented younger faculty, and promote big data science and technology, thus impacting Kentucky's and the nation's economic development.
