Video: Introduction to Bridges Supercomputer at PSC

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In this video, Nick Nystrom from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center presents: Introduction to Bridges: Connecting Researchers, Data and HPC.

In 4Q2014, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center received a $9.65M NSF award to create a uniquely capable supercomputer designed to empower new research communities, bring desktop convenience to supercomputing, expand campus access, and help researchers facing challenges in Big Data to work more intuitively. Called Bridges, the new system will consist of tiered, large-shared-memory resources with nodes having 12TB, 3TB, and 128GB each, dedicated nodes for database, web, and data transfer, high-performance shared and distributed data storage, Hadoop acceleration, powerful new CPUs and GPUs, and a new, uniquely powerful interconnection network.

Bridges will serve a wide variety of applications and scientists, especially those new to supercomputing and without specialized programming skills. It will do so by providing a high degree of interactivity, gateways and tools for gateway-building, and a very flexible user environment including widely-used software such as R, Java, Python, and MATLAB. Bridges will feature persistent database and web services to support gateways, collaboration, and new levels of access to data repositories. Using virtualization, Bridges will support application-specific environments and interoperability with clouds. Bridges will be a resource on XSEDE, the NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, and an important new part of NSF’s advanced cyberinfrastructure ecosystem, connecting with other computational resources, data resources, and scientific instruments. Bridges will be available to the open research community at no charge, bringing the power of high-performance computing and Big Data to enable research projects throughout Pennsylvania and across the country.

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