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News Release

Cornell partners in NSF distributed cloud computing grant


Contact: Paul Redfern
Cell: (607) 227-1865

FOR RELEASE: June 3, 2020

ITHACA, NY – The Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) is among 7 collaborators participating in Indiana University's $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to deploy Jetstream 2, an 8 petaFLOPs distributed cloud computing system intended to support on-demand research, artificial intelligence, and enhanced large-scale data analysis.

Consisting of five computational systems, Jetstream 2's primary system will be located at Indiana University, with four smaller regional systems deployed nationwide at Cornell University, Arizona State University, the University of Hawaii and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The system will use next generation AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and 18.5 petabytes of storage.

The regional system deployed at Cornell will consist of 1,024 compute cores and 869TB storage. The "New York zone" will be used to explore federation of clouds and to make OpenStack enhancements that will be shared with the rest of the project team and disseminated to the broader research community.

"CAC staff will work with members of the XSEDE project and draw on our experiences with the Aristotle Cloud Federation project to create campus cloud software and tools that interested campuses can use to set up their own clouds," says Rich Knepper, Cornell's project lead and CAC deputy director. "We will also develop Cornell Virtual Workshop training materials to assist users in the adoption of Jetstream 2 resources."

The current Jetstream system was funded as the NSF's production sciences and engineering research cloud system for the nation.

"We intend Jetstream 2 to be a democratizing force within the NSF ecosystem, allowing researchers and educators access to cutting-edge resources regardless of project scale," said David Y. Hancock, Jetstream 2 principal investigator.

The project team also has a goal of serving more students than any other NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure resource, leading to a diverse pool of graduates entering the STEM workforce with robust training in computational science.

Additional Jetstream 2 partners include the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, with Dell Inc. as the primary supplier.

"These awards represent a suite of complementary advanced computational capabilities and services aimed to empower new fundamental research," says Amy Friedlander, acting director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.

The five-year Jetstream 2 project begins October 2020.