Page 39 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

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— important tools such as Mathworks’ Matlab, Galaxy, RStudio and many more. The high-end research tools available through Jetstream make it easier for researchers to conduct, visualize and share their work, enabling a new level of secure data exchange and professional communications.
The platform runs on Dell hardware, identically replicated at two geographically sep- arate locations in the U.S.: Jetstream-IU, operated by the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute in Bloomington, IN; and Jetstream-TACC, operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT-Austin, TX.
Compute nodes at each of those two main data centers include 320 Dell M630 blades running a total of 640 CPUs that together pack 258 TFLOPS peak processing capability for each location. Jetstream uses the OpenStack software environment, with Ceph (ac- quired by Red Hat) as the storage software. Storage resides on 20 Dell R730 servers at each location with an aggregate of 960 TB of raw storage at each of the two sites.
By March 2018, allocations awarded on Jetstream for education program devel- opment and limited engagement workshops, as well as for semester-long courses, had reached more than 7 million CPU hours. In spite of that demonstrated success, the team’s emphasis is still placed squarely on outreach and education. As Hancock pointed out, “The most user-friendly NSF-funded system ever created will not be a success without users.”
As a user-friendly research and education cloud, Jetstream’s offerings are supported by experienced technical staff as well as education, outreach and training teams. “Jet- stream was designed from the start to focus on science, run by staff who are experi- enced in supporting researchers and educators,” said Hancock. Funding for Jetstream has been extended for operations through November 2020. Workshops, seminars and conference presentations continue to attract new research and education users and boost Jetstream’s ability to serve higher education’s need for wider access to high-end compute power — a need that had gone unmet in previous years.
Meg Lloyd is a freelance writer based in Northern California. CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019
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