Research Powerhouse
High Performance Computing (HPC) is critical for supporting our NUS research community in their work to innovate and develop solutions that meet the present and emerging needs of Singapore, Asia and the world.
HPC combines hardware, software, tools and programming techniques to accelerate research computation in a research environment, which will in turn enable the execution of large cutting-edge research simulation that accelerates new discoveries.
Here’s what we did to make ‘great’ greater!
Cloud Programme – FREE AWS CLOUD CREDITS FOR RESEARCH
On top of the HPC resources and services provided to researchers through on-campus infrastructure, we also partner with commercial cloud service providers. Our intent is to promote advanced computing technologies to accelerate researchers’ work and gain a competitive edge in their research field.
This programme aims to provide free Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud credits for eligible research projects within the NUS community. These cloud credits can be used by researchers to consume a wide range of AWS cloud resources and services such as EC2, S3, Fargate and etc. when conducting their project work.
Outcome and Statistics
- Completed 2 rounds of call-for-application
- Disbursed a total of USD200,000 credits to 15 research groups. (The supported projects came from a diverse set of scientific domains, such as molecular dynamics, genomics, gamification, autonomous vehicle, NFT, etc.)
Research Data Storage – New heights in capacity & cost savings
As research projects usually require huge computing resources and involve a large amount of data, an infrastructure upgrade was carried out to expand the existing research data storage service to provide a centralised and secured on-demand service to store their research data. With the new procurement model, we were able to provide a more attractive option to researchers as compared to the cloud offering, by reducing the cost of subscription by $9 per TB per month.
Outcome and Statistics
- Added 1.4 Petabyte- s of raw storage space (1 PB = 1,000 TB or 1 million GB);
- 60% reduction in subscription rate from $15/TB/Month to $6/TB/Mon
Free HPC service for all researchers
What’s better than having HPC service at your disposal? When this service comes free for all researchers in NUS, whenever they require advanced computing resources to enable and accelerate their compute-intensive workloads.
Outcome and Statistics
- 34 Million CPU-hours of computing time provided to 919 unique researchers from January to October 2022
Free GPU Compute time to drive AI research
Yet another free HPC service is provided to all researchers in NUS that require Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing resources to enable and accelerate their Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) workloads. As it takes a lot of computational power to train deep learning models, do AI inferencing in real-time, and run analytics on massive amounts of data, GPUs offer a parallel architecture and high performance that speed up certain computing processes, especially those related to AI and ML models.
Outcome and Statistics
- 1.29 Million hours of GPU time provided to 196 unique AI/ML researchers from January to October 2022