CC* Compute: An Open Science Grid shared computing platform at Penn State

This project establishes a new state-of-the-art high-throughput computing cluster for researchers across the 24-campus Penn State University system. The cluster is composed of 10 AMD EPYC nodes, each with 128 cores and one A40 Nvidia GPU. Researchers in the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, priority users for the cluster, use this computer cluster to: study the universe by analyzing data to find ripples in space called gravitational waves; investigate novel ways to track down the universe’s missing matter called dark matter; and search for planets around other stars.The new computing cluster improves access to computing for all Penn State researchers in the hopes of accelerating the pace of discovery across a broad spectrum of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math through projects engaging the Penn State “Research Innovation with Scientists and Engineers (RISE)” CyberTeam (NSF OAC-2018299). The cluster is connected to the Open Science Grid bolstering the fabric of national cyberinfrastructure that supports competitive US research through sharing resources across universities. Penn State also plans to use this resource for annual summer schools for students focused on data analysis, computing, physics, and astronomy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.