Unlocking the power of data will accelerate discovery to advance science, improve our quality of life, and enhance national competitiveness. The increasing importance of data is driving a rapid evolution of research, creating opportunities for breakthroughs by combining the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) simulation. To address this exciting opportunity for the nation's research community, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), will deploy Bridges-2, a resource that will provide exceptional capacity and transformative capability for rapidly evolving, data- and computation-intensive research. Building on PSC's experience with its very successful Bridges system, Bridges-2 will take the next step in pioneering converged, scalable HPC, AI, and data; prioritize researcher productivity and ease of use; and provide an extensible architecture for interoperation with complementary data-intensive projects, campus resources, and clouds. Bridges-2 will deploy new high-performance technologies to deliver results faster by combining AI with simulation and through exceptional data-handling capabilities and will be integrated with NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure (CI) services for allocation, user-support, monitoring, etc., such as those currently provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and XDMoD.
Bridges-2 will accelerate discovery to benefit science, society, and the nation. Its unique architecture will catalyze breakthroughs in critically important areas such as understanding the brain, developing new materials for sustainable energy production and quantum computing, assembling genomes of crop species to improve agricultural efficiency, exploring the universe via multimessenger astrophysics, and enabling technologies for smart cities. A great amount of valuable research is in areas that did not traditionally use HPC until Bridges. Bridges-2 will therefore serve nontraditional communities and applications, which now have workloads requiring great capacity, as well as traditional ones. Its community data collections and user-friendly interfaces will democratize participation in science and engineering and foster collaboration and convergence research. The Bridges-2 project includes areas of focus on developing STEM talent, engaging industry, reaching beyond borders, and broadly engaging stakeholders to develop the nation's workforce, maximize learning through collaboration, and bring the benefits of advanced computing to the general public.
PSC is integrating cutting-edge technologies to deploy a uniquely powerful national resource for turning data into knowledge. Bridges-2 will consist of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Apollo 2000 and ProLiant DL560 central processing unit (CPU) servers of three different memory capacities (256GB, 512GB, and 4TB) for extremely broad workloads; Apollo 6500 servers each with two CPUs and eight graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI (particularly deep learning) and to accelerate simulations; and ProLiant DL360/380 servers for gateways, databases, and utility and management functions. A hierarchical data management system using HPE's Data Management Framework (DMF) will provide seamless access with exceptional ease of use to active and archival data, spanning a Lustre parallel filesystem and StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library. An HPE TierZero high-performance flash array will provide even higher performance for data-intensive applications. A Mellanox HDR InfiniBand interconnect will provide unified, high-performance data transport across compute and storage components. The Bridges-2 user environment will be extremely robust and flexible, supporting HPC applications, AI frameworks, high-productivity programming languages, containers, interactive and batch execution, workflows, databases, and science gateways. Bridges-2's uniquely flexible software environment and heterogeneous hardware resources will serve the needs of rapidly evolving research, opening the door to discovery and the path to prosperity.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
