Center 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.

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; and test state-of-the-art hardware and software to support research and teaching needs for high-performance computing.

The Center and UKITS operate and manage a UK HPC supercomputing facility containing nearly 33,000 processor cores and 128 high-performance graphics processing units (GPU accelerators) with a combined peak performance of 2.2 petaflops through traditional batch processing clusters. The LCC (Lipscomb Compute Cluster) and MCC (Morgan Compute Cluster) together include about 430 compute nodes with memory ranging from 192GB to 4TB per node. Each of the compute nodes has between 32 to 128 compute cores. 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.

The Center also provides programmable cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, managed cloud-native platforms and applications, consulting, and research and development efforts into new cloud computing technologies such as OpenStack deployments, distributed systems, and 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) on 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.

The center also manages 10PB of NAS storage as part of our condo model, where researchers purchase storage at subsidized rates to store their research data.

Other high-performance computing resources are available to researchers through CCS as well. For example, the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), the world’s most extensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research, is a single virtual system that scientists can use to share computing resources, data, and 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 and to 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.

The Centre, through these HPC and distributed infrastructure, supports over 1200 active UK, regional, and national researchers, including users from over 55 academic departments within the UK. In addition, the HPC clusters provide over 100 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.

LCC system overview

MCC system overview