Carnegie Mellon University data center to host Open Cirrus HPC cluster

The research data center at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science will host one of the series of computing clusters around the world that comprise Open Cirrus, a test bed for cloud computing research created by HP, Intel and Yahoo! This is the second Open Cirrus cluster the university’s scientists will have had access to.

The Carnegie Mellon site, hosted within the university’s Data Center Observatory, will focus on researching ways to make cloud computing infrastructure faster, increase its reliability and energy efficiency, as well as deploying new applications on cloud infrastructure.

With the addition of Carnegie Mellon, Open Cirrus infrastructure is now deployed at 10 sites, including government and academic institutions in the US, Europe and Asia. This and other Open Cirrus sites will become available to researchers later this year.

“Having a facility like this and being able to participate in Open Cirrus will provide us with unprecedented opportunities for research and education on Internet-scale computing,” Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science, said in a statement.

“We see applications well beyond those being pursued by industry today, including astronomy, neuroscience and knowledge extraction and representation, and we will be able to delve more deeply into the design of the system itself.”

The Data Center Observatory at Carnegie Mellon does not have a dedicated chiller plant, sharing a chilled water system with other university facilities instead

The new cluster at Carnegie Mellon consists of 159 servers, powered by 1,165 processing cores. It has 2.4 terabytes of memory and 900 terabytes of storage. APC supplied power management and cooling infrastructure that supports the cluster.

Carnegie Mellon researchers have had access to another Open Cirrus cluster at an Intel Labs-operated site on the university’s campus. They have also had access to another cloud computing cluster (not part of Open Cirrus) since 2007: a 4,000-processor M45 system, provided by Yahoo!

Other sites that host parts of the Open Cirrus infrastructure include HP Labs, Intel Research, Yahoo!, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Russian Academy of Sciences, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea and MIMOS, a Malaysian R&D organization.