The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee (UT) is pleased to announce the 2014 open call for participation in the Beacon Project, an ongoing research project funded by the National Science Foundation and UT to explore the impact of emerging computer architectures on computational science and engineering.
Beacon is a Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer that ranked #1 on the November 2012 Green500 list. The system offers access to 48 compute nodes and 6 I/O nodes joined by FDR InfiniBand interconnect providing 56 Gb/s of bi-directional bandwidth. Each compute node is equipped with 2 Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 processors, 4 Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors 5110P, 256 GB of RAM, and 960 GB of SSD storage. Each I/O node provides access to an additional 4.8 TB of SSD storage. Thus, Beacon provides 768 conventional cores and 11,520 accelerator cores that provide over 210 TFLOP/s of combined computational performance, 12 TB of system memory, 1.5 TB of coprocessor memory, and over 73 TB of SSD storage, in aggregate. Industry-leading debuggers, profilers, and performance analysis tools from Intel, RogueWave, and Allinea are available for use on the system.
Individual researchers and teams are invited to submit proposals for projects investigating the impact of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor(s), the large amounts of memory per CPU core, and/or the use of parallel SSD storage on areas of interest to their particular field of study. Projects involving high-performance computing (HPC) applications in fields such as biology, economics, social sciences, and other non-traditional HPC domains are especially encouraged, as are projects associated with data-intensive computing and data-driven workflows. While Beacon is primarily a development cluster, projects involving production runs at small scale are welcome.
Selected proposals will be awarded time, training, and limited support on Beacon for a period of one year from the award date, unless specified otherwise in the award notification. In return, award recipients are expected to disseminate their results to the scientific and engineering community in the form of papers, presentations, and a final report. Award recipients are also expected to provide status updates to NICS when requested.
For more information about the 2014 open call for participation in the Beacon project please see https://www.jics.tennessee.edu/aace/beacon/open-call
For questions please email beacon-proposal@nics.tennessee.edu
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