High Performance Computing (HPC) Program
REDE, in coordination with ITCS, has invested in two pilot programs to provide access to high performance computing (HPC) resources for primary investigators and their labs to generate the preliminary data needed to make high quality applications to extramural grant funding agencies.
The available resources consist of two sources:
- NC State (see technical details below)
- Microsoft Azure (see technical details below)
The Azure resources are consumption based and available through June 30, 2024, whereas the NC State resources are available for 5 years. Based on the experience with the pilot process, we may move to a fee-based program depending on need and availability of resources.
Investigators will receive cost metric reports that will allow them to include line-items in their grant proposal budget to further fund their research utilizing these HPC resources.
PIs interested in accessing these resources may submit an application:
Selection criteria will include the type of project and its funding potential, as well as the PI’s ability to complete the research. Please see HPC Scoring Rubric (Word) and Project Summary Template (Word) as a guide for what is needed for the application.
Applications will be reviewed monthly beginning October 17, 2023. Award notifications from the October 17th review will be made by November 10th and every four weeks thereafter.
Contact Dr. Mary Farwell with questions: farwellm@ecu.edu l 252-328-4810
Application Process
Step 1: Application Submitted
Step 2: Associate Dean for Research Approval
Step 3: Committee Review, Triage, and Approval
Step 4: NC State, Azure, Other
Step 5: Applicant and Chair Notification
What is High Performance Computing?
“HPC is technology that uses clusters of powerful processors, working in parallel, to process massive multi-dimensional datasets (big data) and solve complex problems at extremely high speeds. HPC systems typically perform at speeds more than one million times faster than the fastest commodity desktop, laptop or server systems.”
– IBM, https://www.ibm.com/topics/hpc
- Data analysis, modeling, simulations
- Regression calculations
- Monte Carlo Simulations
- Spatial Analysis
- Broad application across Finance, Healthcare, Geography, Energy, Engineering
HPC Resources Technical Details
NC State High Performance Computing Partner Program
- This is a dedicated 3 node cluster for ECU
- Compute time (1M cpu-hr) on NC State’s shared Hazel cluster.
- More details on NC State’s HPC core facility can be found here: https://hpc.ncsu.edu/main.php
Microsoft Azure Cloud resources
- Slurm job scheduling and queuing, InfiniBand interconnects for clusters, and large storage area for data. Compute resources include:
- H-Series systems utilizing AMD EPYC 7003-series CPU cores or Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 CPU cores
- M-Series memory optimized systems for heavy in-memory workloads and Intel Xeon Platinum 8180M (Skylake) CPU cores
- N-Series systems optimized for GPU workloads including NVIDIA Tesla P40, M60, or V100 GPUs
- More details on Azure’s HPC capabilities in the cloud can be found here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/high-performance-computing
