Equipment: CC* Campus Compute: Advanced Computing for Claflin University Research and Teaching Ecosystem

Claflin University builds its first campus-shared, high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support the computing needs of its researchers and educators. Claflin University is partnered with Clemson University who will be hosting the HPC resource on their behalf. This partnership allows researchers at Claflin University to be immediately productive and benefit from an advanced data center staffed with experienced engineers and support personnel. In addition, this partnership’s aim is to support Claflin University while they build capacity within their IT department to support this type of resource, based on the extensive experience Clemson has with a research support model. This resource addresses the needs of researchers at Claflin University for advancement of their research projects in biophysics, chemistry, cybersecurity, and mathematics. Further, the HPC cluster enables the incorporation of advanced computing into curriculum, producing students better prepared for graduate school and workforce. The HPC cluster allocates 20% of the total compute cycles to support “The OSG Consortium” a distributed High Throughput Computing service supporting open science and researchers nationally. The new HPC cluster supports four STEM research areas, while continuing to broaden campus participation. In addition, the cluster enables the hiring of new Claflin University faculty looking to support their research efforts. The four areas of immediate research needs are cybersecurity, mathematics, chemistry, and biology. To support these needs, the cluster build consists of a combination of different types of GPUs, CPU’s, and high memory. Each one of these combinations meets the minimum research resources required by the named researchers. The cluster is built on Dell PowerEdge R760 chassis using Rocky Linux 8 OS image. This combination best supported current needs while allowing room for growth in anticipation of additional compute cycle requests and research support expansion. Claflin users have access to Clemson’s Palmetto Login nodes to submit SLURM jobs, Open OnDemand for point-and-click HPC, data transfer nodes running Globus, Gitlab, and Mattermost user community space. The Claflin CI Facilitator works closely with the Clemson Research Team to identify opportunities, issues and make resolutions or suggestions to satisfy the request. The long term goal is to move the cluster to Claflin when the support resources are in place to ensure success for the faculty and researchers. 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.