Gateways to Discovery: Cyberinfrastructure for the Long Tail of Science

Abstract

NSF-funded computing centers have primarily focused on delivering high-performance computing resources to academic researchers with the most computationally demanding applications. But now that computational science is so pervasive, there is a need for infrastructure that can serve more researchers and disciplines than just those at the peak of the HPC pyramid. Here we describe SDSC's Comet system, which is scheduled for production in January 2015 and was designed to address the needs of a much larger and more expansive science community-- the "long tail of science". Comet will have a peak performance of 2 petaflop/s, mostly delivered using Intel's next generation Xeon processor. It will include some large-memory and GPU-accelerated nodes, node-local flash memory, 7 PB of Performance Storage, and 6 PB of Durable Storage. These features, together with the availability of high performance virtualization, will enable users to run complex, heterogeneous workloads on a single integrated resource.