Center Overview
Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) Overview
The University of Kentucky (UK) Center for Computational Sciences (CCS), established in 1987, is the primary center for high-performance computational activity in the UK. The center supports the success of UK researchers, collaborators, and supporters whose work benefits from research computing solutions.
Mission and Activities
To achieve that mission, center staff:
Facilitate new and innovative uses of computers
Provide an optimal computational training environment
Support interdisciplinary projects requiring computational expertise
Initiate external collaborations by supporting visitors, seminars, workshops, and conferences
Test state-of-the-art hardware and software to support research and teaching needs for high-performance computing.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facility
The Center and UKITS operate and manage a UK HPC supercomputing facility that includes:
nearly 33,000 processor cores and
144 high-performance graphics processing units (GPU accelerators)
A combined peak performance of 5 petaflops through traditional batch processing clusters.
LCC and MCC Compute Clusters
The LCC (Lipscomb Compute Cluster) and MCC (Morgan Compute Cluster) together include:
about 430 compute nodes
Memory ranging from 192GB to 4TB per node.
Between 32 to 128 compute cores per node.
All HPC compute nodes are networked with a high-speed, low-latency 100Gbps EDR InfiniBand interconnect fabric. The high-performance GPFS parallel file systems attached to these central HPC clusters contain 5 PB of usable disk storage for home, project, and scratch directories. In addition, the facility has dedicated high-speed 40Gb data transfer nodes for researchers needing to transfer data to and from external resources and offsite.
Cloud Computing (KyRIC)
The Center also provides
Programmable cloud infrastructure-as-a-service
Managed cloud-native platforms and applications
Consulting services
Research and development efforts into new cloud computing technologies such as:
OpenStack deployments
distributed systems
interactive computing environments like Jupyter notebooks.
These computing environments foster reproducible, shareable computing through containers and virtualization. These services are provided through the Kentucky Research Infrastructure Cloud (KyRIC), which includes
50 compute nodes (a total of 2000 cores)
Each compute node is powered by 40 Intel processors and has 3TB of RAM. In addition
A 2PB usable object-store storage system supports the KyRIC cloud.
Research Data Storage
The center also manages 30PB of NAS storage as part of our condo model, where researchers purchase storage at subsidized rates to store their research data.
National-scale Computing Through NFS ACCESS
Additional high-performance computing resources are available to researchers through CCS as well. One example is the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS).
ACCESS is the world’s most extensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research, is a single virtual system that scientists can use to:
share computing resources
Share datadata
Share expertise through a premier collection of integrated digital resources and services.
Through the NSF ACCESS program and UK partnership as a service provider:
UK researchers have on-campus consultants to help submit allocation requests to ACCESS.
UK researchers access powerful national supercomputing facilities for modeling, simulation, and advanced data and visualization analysis.
In addition to allowing researchers to run their custom code, the most well-known major scientific codes are available through ACCESS resources. All these resources are available at no cost to users.
Users and Research Impact
Through these HPC and distributed infrastructure, the Center:
Supports over 1200 active UK, regional, and national researchers
Serves users from over 55 academic departments within the UK.
The HPC clusters provide over 200 million core hours of computing time annually. These resources are hosted on the UK campus, open to regional researchers, and available to national research collaborators. Active research areas include physics, astronomy, biology, biochemistry, pharmacy, medicine, engineering, and many others.
System Overviews
For more detailed information about specific systems, see: