EVL is a technology Innovator, building industry and cross-institutional connections and partnerships. In 2022, EVL deployed two GPU FIONAs in partnership with the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) and the University of California San Diego. The PRP is a partnership of more than 50 institutions that establishes a science-driven high-capacity data-centric ‘freeway system’. PRP has support from the National Science Foundation, and includes the US Department of Energy’s Energy Science Network (ESnet), as well as scores of research universities in the nation and around the world. PRP leverages Nautilus, a HyperCluster for running containerized Big Data Applications using Kubernetes, and FIONA, flash input/output network applications. A GPU FIONA is a rack-mounted PCs designed by the PRP team that is optimized for 100Gbps large data storage with Mellanox ConnectX-6 SmartNICs, a 24 core Epic Rome CPU, 256GB of memory and 8 NVIDIA RTX-3090 GPUs. Nautilus provides over 7500 CPU cores, over 500 GPUs and 4 PBs of storage. The addition of two Nautilus GPU FIONAs at EVL builds upon our 2018 DTN (Data Transfer Node) that has provided over 300GB of Ceph Storage to Nautilus and our CAVE2 GPU Nodes that are contributing 5 NVIDIA GPUS. EVL provides Nautilus with 300GB of Ceph Storage, 128 CPU cores, and 21 NVIDIA GPUs. The platform is utilized for a wide variety of applications, including applying advanced astronomy AI to microscopy workflow, simulations for natural disasters, climate modeling, virtual reality and even accelerating NSF’s IceCube Photon Propagation. UIC is enabled to participate in these cross-institutional connections using UIC’s HPRNet, a network environment tailored to the needs of high-performance science applications, built on a Science DMZ architecture.

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See media coverage from SC21 on PRP and Nautilus.