IDRE-HPC Proposal Opportunities

Faculty and researchers working on questions involving high-performance computing are eligible to receive IDRE staff and resource support through the annual IDRE Call for Focused Research Projects.

High-Performance Computing Services at UCLA

IDRE faculty and Academic Technology Services (ATS) staff are working together to align high-performance computing resources in support of the UCLA's computationally enabled research. Some of the existing programs and services available to faculty include:

IDRE Cluster Hosting Program

The Cluster Hosting Program consists of the Hoffman2 Cluster and private clusters for individual research groups. Individually hosted clusters are slowly being phased out in favor of the new, shared cluster strategy because the researcher retains most of the benefits of an individual cluster, with the added benefit of accessing more resources than those contributed. This allows IDRE to leverage limited data center space and the personnel required to maintain the cluster. Requests by researchers that require specialized services (software or operating conditions that preclude them from being included in the Research Virtual Shared Cluster) will be considered only for independent stand-alone clusters of 100 cores or more.

Beyond the IDRE Cluster Hosting Program, UCLA has a rich distribution of research clusters across campus. Some of the larger clusters across campus include:

Hoffman2 Cluster

The Hoffman2 Cluster is a 250-node (and growing) cluster available to IDRE-supported researchers and general users. The largest component is the Research Virtual Shared Cluster. This cluster is made up from Contributed cores purchased by individual research groups and Base cores purchased by IDRE to augment the Contributed cores. One benefit of contributing cores to the shared cluster is that a research group is guaranteed use of the number of cores contributed with the ability to use surplus cores from the entire Hoffman2 Cluster. Other benefits provided to research groups when they join the shared cluster include:

  • Complete system administration for contributed cores
  • Use of a high performance network interconnect
  • Home and scratch storage space
  • A dedicated data center facility for housing the cluster. This eliminates the need to perform expensive space, cooling, and electrical modifications to existing office or lab space

Grid Computing

A Grid is a collection of independently owned and administered resources that have been joined together by a software and hardware infrastructure that interacts with the resources and the users of the resources to provide coordinated dynamic resource sharing. UCLA leads the growing number of University of California campuses working together to create the UC Grid, a system-wide grid of computational clusters. Any UCLA student, faculty member, or staff can use the UCLA Grid Portal to gain access to UCLA's cluster resources; to access the entire UC Grid, researchers can submit jobs to the main UC Grid Portal. A number of clusters contribute resources and applications to the pool. When a job is submitted to the pool, the Grid Portal selects the cluster that will result in the shortest wait time.

 

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