Outcomes Report of NSF MRI Grant Posted

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 08:36:25 -0500
hpc, hpcf, website

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

In 2017, a group of 51 UMBC researchers was successful in competing for an MRI (Major Research Infrastructure) grant from the NSF. Having this many faculty -- by my estimate one eighth of all UMBC research/teaching faculty! -- is a powerful signal of the importance of HPCF to the campus and well-appreciated by the NSF program directors. This was in fact the third successful MRI for HPCF, after 2008 and 2012, which in total provided over $1M in funding from the NSF to this campus initiative.

The support of $789,076 financed the extension and update of HPCF with the 2018 equipment, comprising 44 CPU nodes with two 18-core Intel Skylake CPUs and 384 GB of memory each, one node with four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs connected by NVLink, and 8 Big Data nodes with 48 TB disks across 12 hard drives each. The total includes $236,723 cost-sharing funded by UMBC, and we acknowledge this excellent cooperation, in particular with DoIT.

The 3-year grant has formally ended, and an Outcomes Report provides a two-page highlighted summary of the achievements during the funding period. A PDF file of this report from 2020 is now posted on the HPCF webpage under the Research tab, adding to the corresponding report from 2015. I thank the colleagues Daniel Lobo, Curtis Menyuk, Jerimy Polf, Jianwu Wang, Meilin Yu, and Zhibo Zhang for providing the visuals and project information in the Outcomes Report. It represents a wonderful cross-section of the activity using taki.

Matthias Gobbert, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee and PI of the MRI grants)