RIS HPC Newsletter August 2024

High-Performance Communications – August 7, 2024

Unveiling Innovation

Welcome to Storage2

This August, the new Qumulo storage solution will be released for general use as part of the RIS Data Storage Platform.

Why it matters: Now known as Storage2, it provides twice the performance, reduces operational complexities, and includes offsite backups and disaster recovery capabilities. New allocations and condos will be available. The transition from Storage1 will vary depending on the research group.

Your future in high-performance computing

After nine months of gathering requirements and executing RFPs, Dell Technologies was selected as the new Scientific Compute Operational Platform Expansion (SCOPE) vendor. With additional hardware and software components from Nvidia and Vast, this expansion will upgrade, update, and expand the high-performance compute platform RIS maintains.

By the numbers: 

  • 5000 Intel CPU Cores
  • 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs
  • 200 Gigabit network adapters
  • 1PB Vast scratch storage

Exploring Frontiers With Computational Power

Research @ WashU with the Chen Lab

Hong Chen Lab group photo 2024. ©Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr.

By the Numbers: RIS resources at work

  • 5 TB active storage
  • 10 TB of archive storage
  • Access to the general compute resource pool of 6,300+ CPU cores and 100+ GPUs
  • 2,262 jobs consumed 2,068,370 CPU core hours and 234,460 GPU hours

Mission: Developing innovative, focused ultrasound technology for applications evolving the brain. This makes ultrasounds more affordable, portable, and noninvasive, allowing for the interface with the brain without any surgery. 

Objective: To transform the process of neurosurgery and introduce the concept of using ultrasound technology in neuroscience to study how the brain functions non-invasively. 

Resulted Success: Published last September, the First-in-human prospective trial of sonobiopsy in high-grade glioma patients using neuronavigation-guided focused ultrasound was successful.

Expert Insights: “The support from RIS for all our computations is critical to our research. Before we had access to the cluster, running one simulation on one patient took us two to three days, and now it takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes—Dr. Hong Chen, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

“Strong communication between RIS and our lab enables us to fix an inability to run code.” – Andrew Stark, Engineering – Biomedical Engineering.

Stay Informed and Inspired

Maintenance follow-up: major storage & compute platform upgrades  

On June 14 and 17 – 20, RIS performed maintenance on our Data Storage and Scientific Compute platforms.

Updates: 400+ servers updated with the following

  • OS RHEL: 8.8 LTS
  • Kernel: 4.18.0
  • IBM GPFS:  5.1.9.3
  • Nvidia: 550.54.15
  • Docker: to 26.1.1
  • Cuda: 12.4.1

For more information, please read the May RIS HPC Newsletter.

Elevate your expertise

Join virtual workshops offered by Becker Library in collaboration with WUIT’s Research Infrastructure Services (RIS) designed to deepen your knowledge, refine your skills, and provide hands-on experience in a dynamic learning environment.