XSEDE15

NSF-funded computing centers have traditionally focused on the requirements of academic researchers with the most computationally demanding applications. But now that computational science is so pervasive, there is a need for infrastructure that can serve more researchers and disciplines than just those at the peak of the HPC pyramid. SDSC’s Comet system was specifically designed to address the needs of this much larger and more expansive science community – the “long tail of science”. The full system comprises nearly 2000 compute nodes, each containing two 12-core Intel Haswell processors capable of executing the AVX2 instruction set, 128 GB of DDR4 memory and two local 160 GB flash drives. The system also has 36 GPU nodes, containing two dual-GPU NVIDIA K80 cards, and later this year will deploy four 1.5 TB large memory nodes and provide high performance virtual clusters using single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV).
 
After briefly describing the Comet architecture and its capabilities, we will seek feedback from the BoF participants that will help us to better serve the needs of the XSEDE community. Discussion topics may include, but are by no means limited to: identifying domains, users and applications that are well matched to Comet, suggested software installations, documentation and training to help users make effective use of Comet’s unique features, maximizing the usability of Comet by Science Gateway developers, complementing other XSEDE resources and assisting new users in quickly getting up to speed using the system.