Facilities, Equipment, and Other Resources Statement

The following is a draft Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources statement that researchers can include in research proposals:

Computing resources will be provided through Advanced Research Computing (ARC) within the Division of Information Technology at Virginia Tech. ARC provides cutting-edge high-performance computing and visualization resources. Currently available high performance computing (HPC) systems include:

  1. TinkerCliffs: a general purpose CPU cluster. This cluster has approximately 40,000 AMD Rome CPU cores, HDR Infiniband offering 100 Gbps throughput, nodes for high-memory applications, an additional 16 Intel Xeon AP nodes and four nodes with eight NVIDIA A100-80GB GPUs each

  2. Infer: GPU-based cluster made up of 58 compute nodes with a total of 4 NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs, 18 NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs, and 80 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs; Infiniband interconnect

  3. Cascades: General purpose cluster with 190 compute nodes equipped with two 16-core Intel Xeon “Broadwell” CPU and 128 GB of memory; 38 compute nodes equipped with two 12-core Intel Xeon Skylake CPU, 376 GB of memory, and two NVIDIA V100 GPU; 4 compute nodes with two NVIDIA K80 GPU, 512 GB of memory and one 2 TB NVMe flash card; 2 four-socket compute nodes with four 18-core Intel Xeon “Broadwell” CPU and 3 TB of memory; Mellanox EDR Infiniband interconnect

  4. Dragonstooth: High-throughput cluster with 48 two-socket compute nodes equipped with two 12-core Intel Xeon “Haswell” CPU, 256 GB of memory and four 480GB SSD drives

Parallel filesystems provide over 11 Petabytes of high performance storage, and a tape archive is provided to support long term data storage.

ARC’s Visionarium Lab also provides an array of visualization resources, including the VisCube, an immersive 10′ x 10′ three-dimensional visualization environment. In all, the VT Visionarium provides nearly 86 million pixels, 4 billion triangles-per-second and 22 TB/s of GPU memory bandwidth. ARC resources are able to leverage Virginia Tech’s excellent network connectivity, and network. Virginia offers access to advanced national networks, including ESnet, Internet2, and Mid Atlantic Crossroads.

Upcoming Resources

In the next year, ARC plans to release additional resources supporting:

  1. Protected data: This will be a dedicated cluster and storage supporting data needing elevated protections. This cluster will be available early in the winter of 2021-2022.

  2. AI/ML: Additional nodes will be added to the TinkerCliffs cluster to support AI/ML applications. Scheduled to be released in late Spring 2022.

  3. Cloud: Kubernetes resource for cloud-like applications.