NSF Funds $10 Million for ‘Expanse’ Supercomputer at SDSC

SDSC has been awarded a five-year grant from the NSF valued at $10 million to deploy Expanse, a new supercomputer designed to advance research that is increasingly dependent upon heterogeneous and distributed resources. “As a standalone system, Expanse represents a substantial increase in the performance and throughput compared to our highly successful, NSF-funded Comet supercomputer. But with innovations in cloud integration and composable systems, as well as continued support for science gateways and distributed computing via the Open Science Grid, Expanse will allow researchers to push the boundaries of computing and answer questions previously not possible.”

Video: Mellanox Powers Open Science Grid on Comet Supercomputer

“We are pioneering the area of virtualized clusters, specifically with SR-IOV,” said Philip Papadopoulos, SDSC’s chief technical officer. “This will allow virtual sub-clusters to run applications over InfiniBand at near-native speeds – and that marks a huge step forward in HPC virtualization. In fact, a key part of this is virtualization for customized software stacks, which will lower the entry barrier for a wide range of researchers by letting them project an environment they already know onto Comet.”