This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This proposal is to enhance the existing research computing facility and network connections at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville campus. This award will provide the infrastructure support for the planned HPC acquisitions to achieve a target core count of about 6000 cores, which require a target data center capacity of 300kW, and 10Gbps networking connectivity in support of research computing. The renovations include adding a new electrical service entrance, uninterruptible power supplies, additional cooling capability, campus research network upgrades from 1Gbps to 10Gbps and a research network path from the campus to INTERNET2.
The research that will be supported by the renovated facility is of the highest intellectual merit. Research areas that will be enabled by this infrastructure project include integrated nanoscience, computational chemistry, computational biomagnetics, materials science, and spatial science. Planned collaborative projects include the programming of alternative architectures (including GPGPUs and multicore), and modeling, measurement, and experimental evaluation of new parallel hardware and software, including with industrial partners will be an outcome of this grant.
The research to be supported by the renovated facility has very broad impact. Insights from nanoscience research, as well as the direct use of the so-called inverse method, will have great impacts on the design of new and improved devices, such as actuators, sensors, and data storage. Chemistry research will enable the prediction of acidities of drug-type molecules, enabling the development of new drugs. The biomagnetics research has the potential of developing a completely passive, non-invasive technique for breast cancer detection. Nanocomposite research has broad impact on sensor design and application, specifically sensors that employ polymer-based nanocomposites as integral components. The spatial science research has broad impact in the reliability of spatial data.
The Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON) will connect all public four year institutions of education in Arkansas. The renovated facility will be available to all ARE-ON institutions and to collaborators in West Virginia.
We estimate that over the course of the grant period more than 600 undergraduate students and more than 150 graduate students will utilize the facility.
The objective of this grant is to dramatically enhance the infrastructure that supports the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), positioning the University of Arkansas and its partners as a 21st Century science and engineering enterprise. Specifically, this grant provides support for the construction of a new power service entrance exclusively for research computing, procurement and installation of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution unit (PDU) equipment including batteries, and construction of computer cooling facilities equivalent to roughly 100 tons air conditioning using chilled water. This grant also enhances the research network connectivity necessary for high speed data movement, access to national resources, and access to the AHPCC by state and regional partners. Network connectivity to all identified research buildings on the University of Arkansas campus is upgraded to 10 Gbps with connectivity to individual researchers upgraded to at least 1 Gbps. Researchers now have the potential to move files between the AHPCC and NSF XSEDE sites (and to other institutions of higher education) at 10 times the throughput achieved prior to this grant. This is a significant advance in "big data" sharing capabilities for our data-intensive researchers and their collaborators. The renovated facility is available to all institutions in the State of Arkansas connected via the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON) and is utilized by researchers at institutions in the State of West Virginia. The infrastructure provided by this grant allows for the deployment of supercomputing resources with current aggregate performance of approximately 70 Tflops and is sufficiently large to support growth of the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center for many years. This infrastructure and the associated computing resources support research of the highest intellectual merit with broad societal impact. Currently, the AHPCC supports major research initiatives in the fields of integrated nanoscience, computational chemistry, computational materials science, computational biomagnetics, geospatial science and computer science. For example, research in integrated nanoscience focuses on the development of ab initio computational methods for multiferroic solid solutions, which are a promising class of materials exhibiting coexistence between ferroelectricity and magnetism. Research in computational chemistry focuses on the development of computational techniques to study solvent effects on molecular reactivity. Computational materials science research focuses on the properties of polymer-based nanocomposites for use in next-generation sensor technology. Research in computational biomagnetics focuses on biomagnetic signals that are naturally generated due to malignant tumor growth from a cancerous cell. In total, the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center supports the research and education activities of over 200 participants.
