Welcoming 2022 – With more GPUs, free AWS credits, cheap data storage, Omniverse, Quantum, and more …

Rikky Purbojati, Research Computing, NUS IT.

Welcome to 2022!

The New Year comes with (continuing) challenges and opportunities. The global shortage of chips and the emergence of the Omicron variant still poses a considerable risk in terms of delays and missed targets. However, new technologies and the maturing of emergent technologies continue to provide more opportunities for researchers to do exciting things and potentially advance their research work. We’ve heard a lot of hype about the many-verses — be it NVIDIA’s Omniverse, Facebook’s Metaverse, or Microsoft’s Metaverse. All are vying to be the first mover in this not-so-new blue ocean. The rapid evolution of quantum technologies is on a trajectory approaching practical adoption for everybody, and we are seeing the maturing of AI/ML technology as they are widely adopted in many facets of digital transformation projects in the enterprise and research area.

In this issue, I would like to share what the Research Computing group has in store to provide better infrastructure and services to support the research community.  

But first, let’s take a look back for a second. In 2021, our NUS-HPC facility and team provided the following resources or services:

We hope that these resources and services have truly benefited the community. We thank you for your continuous support, and we will continue building our services by engaging and listening to  your feedback.

So, for the year 2022, we have several initiatives planned, ranging from infrastructure improvement to community programmes and emergent technology exploration. The following is a preview of the programmes, including the expected timeline:

NSCC 2.0A user onboarding and training (Q1 2022)

Although the system’s deployment is TBD due to a delay in shipment, we are still committed to providing an onboarding and training programme to our researchers so that they can maximize the benefit of having a 10 PetaFLOPS system in their backyard.

Free AWS research credit, up to S$10,000 per project (Q1 2022)

Through our collaboration with AWS, we were able to secure free research credits that our researchers can use to consume any type of resources in the AWS cloud. If your research uses the cloud or if you are interested in exploring any of the AWS resources for your research, this could be an excellent opportunity to do so. We will open a call-for-application around the end of Q1 through ODPRT’s funding opportunities newsletter. So stay tuned!

New GPU accelerators to expand and refresh the current GPU system (Q2 2022)

Seeing that our GPU system is running more than 90% of its capacity almost all the time, we plan to add more GPU servers into the system so more researchers and students can experience the service with a shorter waiting time. In this round of expansion, we will emphasize visualisation capability rather than pure computing power. The new NSCC 2.0A system would have 70+ NVIDIA A100 servers for pure HPC workload, and we are building a GPU system that complements that capability to provide more options to researchers.

Cost-effective data storage service (Q2 2022)

We heard you! Many researchers are producing a huge amount of data, and there are limited option when it comes to storing it in NUS IT infrastructure. Many have resorted to deleting non-essential/intermediate data or using commercial options to comply with the minimum research data retention policy. We plan to roll out a cheaper data storage service this year at a $6/TB/Mo price point and we hope this could be a viable alternative for researchers and a long-term solution for your needs.

Emergent Tech Exploratory Programmes (Omniverse & Quantum)

In the recent years, there were  a lot of technology hypes, particularly the Verses and Quantum technology. However, most of the time, we have to cut through all the excitements and hyperboles to understand the practical applications that can be used today rather than in five years’ time. To bring these technologies to our community, we plan to conduct some exploratory programmes for the Verse and Quantum tech, specifically NVIDIA Omniverse and AWS Braket. Partnering with the vendors. This programme would include proof-of-concept projects, seminars and workshops, and connecting interested parties with potential researchers that may have immediate practical use-case.

There you have it — These are some of our major initiatives this year, and we hope that these initiatives  can benefit all of our researchers, and at the same time, maintain the same level of support and service. We are looking forward to working with our researchers to implement these projects successfully.

Lastly, we hope for a productive and fruitful year for our users and NUS researchers. Please do not hesitate if you have any suggestions, requirements, collaborations idea, or interest in any of the emerging technologies.

Thank you.