Supercomputing systems to be added at IU

IU will serve as a “critical partner” to two new supercomputing systems, according to the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology. 

The National Science Foundation funded the two systems, called Wrangler and Comet.

Wrangler is a “critical part of the NSF’s response to big data research needs,” said the OVPIT, which consists of Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology Bradley Wheeler and Craig Stewart, associate dean of Research Technologies and executive director of the Pervasive Technology Institute.

“It’s a national data storehouse and exchange for open science research in the US,” Stewart said in an email. “Wrangler will create an unprecedented resource for data storage, manipulation and analysis accessible from anywhere in the U.S.”

Wrangler is funded by a $6 million NSF grant and is scheduled for production in January 2015, according to a press release.

IU will provide data access reliability and security for Wrangler by replicating its 10-petabyte disk storage system in the IU Data Center.   

“IU will host a 10-petabyte disk storage system as part of the overall 21 petabytes of storage that are part of the Wrangler system,” Stewart said. “To put this amount of storage in context, 10 petabytes on DVDs would make a stack more than a mile and a half high.”   

The NSF also awarded $12 million to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California to deploy Comet, the world’s first virtualized high performance computing cluster. Comet will benefit researchers who need quick turnaround on medium-sized computing jobs.

Comet is “a large Dell cluster environment that will support major national computing projects”, Dr. Geoffrey Fox, director of the Digital Science Center at IU, said.
According to Wheeler and Stewart, IU is the only institution that works with both Wrangler and Comet.

“This is a very strong endorsement of the capabilities of the School of Informatics and Computing, University Information Technology Services and Pervasive Technology Institute,” Stewart said. “The combination of research by the School of Informatics and Computing researchers with UITS’s ability to engineer, deploy and support innovative IT solutions has brought tens of millions of dollars in federal research funding to IU.”

He said IU’s involvement in these projects will create at least two job openings.

“With Wrangler comes funding that will add at least one new full time job and a graduate assistant position at IU,” Stewart said. “PTI now has more than 50 jobs funded by federal grants, which add to the Indiana economy and to the knowledge workforce of the state.”

The projects will present a number of opportunities for student involvement as well, he said.

“IU will also play a critical role in supporting citizen science – projects where anyone who is interested in science can participate,” Stewart said. “The research projects benefit from the participation of citizen scientists and such projects are also a great way to interest young people in science and technology.”