ND Leads DOE Grant on Virtual Clusters for Scientific Computing

Prof. Douglas Thain is leading a new $2.2M DOE-funded project titled “ VC3: Virtual Clusters for Community Computation “ in an effort to make our national supercomputing facilities more effective for collaborative scientific computing.  The project team brings together researchers from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and Brookhaven National Lab.

Our current NSF and DOE supercomputers are very powerful, but they each have different operating systems and software configurations, which makes it difficult and time consuming for new users to deploy their codes and share results.  The new service will create virtual clusters on the existing machines that have the custom software and other services needed to easily run advanced scientific codes from fields such as high energy physics, bioinformatics, and astrophysics.  If successful, users of this service will be able to easily move applications between university and national supercomputing facilities.