A system architecture supporting high-performance and cloud computing in an academic consortium environment

This activity has expanded to include other partners in the area, forming the basis for a broader Front Range Computing Consortium (FRCC). This paper describes the development of the Consortium's current architecture for federated high-performance resources, including a new 184 teraflop/s (TF) computational system at CU and prototype data-centric computing resources at NCAR.

CU's new Dell-based computational plant is housed in a co-designed pre-fabricated data center facility that allowed the university to install a top-tier academic resource without major capital facility investments or renovations. We describe integration of features such as virtualization, dynamic configuration of high-throughput networks, and Grid and cloud technologies, into an architecture that supports collaboration among regional computational science participants.