SIGUCCS 2016

In 1997, Indiana University (IU) began a purposeful and steady drive to expand the use of supercomputers and what we now call cyberinfrastructure. In 2001, IU implemented the first 1 TeraFLOPS supercomputer owned by and operated for a single university in the United States. Subsequently, in 2013, IU made a similar achievement at a 1 PetaFLOPS level: Big Red II, a Cray XE6/XK7, was the first supercomputer capable of 1 PetaFLOPS (theoretical) performance.

Supercomputing plays a strong role in IU’s competitiveness for contracts and grants funding. The facilities and grants income from the teams that use Big Red II more than pays for the system costs itself. Currently, 176 disciplines and subdisciplines are represented on Big Red II with a wide variety of usage needs.

Indiana University has scaled up its resources and the use of its supercomputers across traditional and nontraditional disciplines. The critical learning from our experience is how such centrally-managed high performance computer systems can be used to foster innovation across many disciplines. The techniques we employed to achieve utility across the broad user community can be applied to campuses of many sizes and shared supercomputers and clusters of many sizes. Our primary goal in this paper and presentation will be explaining how you can foster innovation at your home campus, no matter what size of a cluster or supercomputer you can afford (and even if you can’t afford any locally).