Oklahoma State University Selects Advanced Clustering to Build New HPC Cluster

Oklahoma State University has selected Advanced Clustering Technologies to build and install its newest supercomputer, which will support computing- and data-intensive research across a broad range of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

The new supercomputer, which will be named after the university’s mascot, Pistol Pete, will serve as a campus-wide shared resource, available at no charge to all OSU faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates, as well as to researchers and educators across Oklahoma.
“Pistol Pete will make it possible for us to continue to meet the ever-growing demand for computational and data-intensive research and education at OSU and across Oklahoma,” said Dr. Dana Brunson, Assistant Vice President for Research Cyberinfrastructure and Director of the OSU High Performance Computing Center as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. “This new cluster allows us to extend the mission of our High Performance Computing Center, which is to put advanced technology in the hands of our faculty, staff and students more quickly and less expensively, and with greater certainty of success.”

Dr. Brunson is principal investigator of the grant proposal, Acquisition of Shared High Performance Compute Cluster for Multidisciplinary Computational and Data-Intensive Research, that was awarded a $951,570 Major Research Instrumentation grant by the National Science Foundation.

The new cluster is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (previously known as Skylake). Pistol Pete consists of more than 5,300 compute cores in Advanced Clustering’s innovative ACTblade x110 systems.  Along with the large compute capacity, a high-speed Lustre storage system and low-latency 100Gb/s Omni-Path fabric is part of the turn-key cluster being delivered.

“We are proud to be working with Dr. Brunson and Oklahoma State University to provide this new high performance computing resource,” said Kyle Sheumaker, President of Advanced Clustering Technologies, which specializes in providing turn-key HPC resources to universities, government agencies and enterprises across the country. Advanced Clustering also built the university’s previous cluster, called Cowboy, which at its deployment in 2012 was a 3,048-core cluster using servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family. Cowboy gave the center nine times the capacity of its previous cluster in only two times the physical space.

Pistol Pete will support research in more than 30 departments and many collaborating research teams, including 129 faculty and more than 740 postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates. Research topics include bioinformatics, biomolecular model development; crop modeling, environment and ecosystem modeling; classical and quantum calculations of liquids, proteins, interfaces and reactions; design and discovery of organic semiconductor materials; cybersecurity and social network modeling; commutative algebra; graph-based data mining; renewable energy research; seismology; sociopolitical landscape modeling; and high energy and medical physics.

About the High Performance Computing Center at Oklahoma State University
The High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) facilitates computational and data-intensive research across a wide variety of disciplines. HPCC provides Oklahoma State University students, faculty and staff with cyberinfrastructure resources, cloud services, education and training, bioinformatics assistance, proposal support and collaboration. Learn more about HPCC resources at https://hpcc.okstate.edu/.

About Advanced Clustering Technologies

Advanced Clustering Technologies has been building customized, turn-key high performance computing clusters, servers and workstations since the company’s founding in 2001. The company specializes in developing campus-wide supercomputers, which when fully utilized can help maintain and grow a university’s competitive edge by attracting researchers and students from around the globe. Advanced Clustering’s knowledgeable team of HPC experts provide phone and email support for the lifetime of your system. For more information, visit advancedclustering.com.