MRI: Acquisition of the Kentucky Research Informatics Cloud (KyRIC)

Today scientific inquiry and discovery is enabled through computation. Computing, theory and experimentation are all essential to today�fs science and engineering research. We are proposing to greatly expand and enhance our current conventional computational system and create a new hybrid system -a research cloud. The Kentucky Research Informatics Cloud (KyRIC) will be a major computing and storage system that will enable both computational and big data analytics research for not only the University of Kentucky, but for all universities across the state of Kentucky as well as with our national partners (via XSEDE). KyRIC will be a hybrid architecture that supports massively parallel (MP) applications (through our existing system) as well as the exciting and challenging new data and memory intensive research in big data science which we will acquire with this grant. Specifically we will create our new hybrid system which will be composed of 3 subsystems: (1) Our existing MPP Dell Infiniband Cluster (2): our to be acquired Large Memory Analytics system composed of 62 PowerEdge R930 Servers with 4 Intel Xeon E7�-4820 processors and 2 TB memory, and (3) a new Peta�]scale storage system which builds on our current research storage including a new 1.6 TB Solid State Disk. KyRIC will build upon our existing MPP HPC system and our new state�-wide high performance network initiative (multiple 100 gb/s links from Lexington to Louisville and Cincinnati). We have strong support and commitment of the University�fs administration including our SVP and CIO (Kellen) who is a Co�]PI on this proposal. The KyRIC will be managed by UKAT (UKy Advanced Technology Research Computing group) working with our newly �"revised�" Center for Computational Science�'s Faculty Advisory Committee to establish policy on usage and priorities. KyRIC will be supplementing and joining XSEDE so we are committed to continuing to expand our national multi�-petascale capabilities. The UKy Team of researchers also believe that having access to resources locally that compliment XSEDE will help accelerate our research (higher bandwidth, lower latency to the desktop for code development and interactive data analysis). KyRIC will provide resources for a broad range of research addressing both applied and fundamental problems in science, engineering, agriculture, health and education. Our major research thrust areas that will be enabled by the acquisition of our memory intensive new system will be: . Bioinformatics and System Biology Algorithms (Moseley) . Large Graph and Network Analysis (Zhang) . Image Processing (Griffioen) . Computational Modeling and Simulation Analytics (Payne). KyRIC will not only be used by the researchers highlighted in this proposal but by the many users of the current UKy HPC system and our new state�]wide computational collaborators (UL, NKU, KSU, etc.). We will provide an easy to use �"on ramp�" for our investigators to strong analytical and visualization tools, and to larger national resources. In addition, KyRIC will improve and enhance the research training of hundreds of undergraduates, graduate students and PostDocs from Arts & Sciences, Engineering and Agriculture.