Greetings!
I wanted to give you an update as to the status of the combined HPC purchase. We’ve made much progress. We have resolved the final details of the order and associated acceptance criteria, and our vendor (Penguin Computing) is now working on building the federated clusters. We will be getting continual updates (including photos from the factory floor) from Penguin on the status of the clusters and will send them out to you as we get them.
I know everybody is anxious to begin using these resources for research, so here is a preliminary schedule going forward:
mid February
- delivery of equipment
early/mid March
- completion of on-site testing by Penguin
mid/late March
- OIT completes software installation
- ready for user acceptance testing
late March, early April
- ready for research
We’ve been working with your students to identify codes suitable for the user acceptance testing portion. OIT/PACE will be providing some equipment early in this process for your students to ensure that their codes are ready for these tests.
Also, as part of this procurement process, we have issued a State Agency purchasing contract which will provide savings and streamline this and future HPC purchases. We’re working with Purchasing on an official communication with the details.
Neil Bright