Research Computing Facilities

The new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster has 12 compute nodes and is offered as a research computing core service.  Each of these nodes has two CPUs (Intel Xenon Gold 6342 @ 2.80 GHz with 24-cores each) and 4 GPUs (NVIDIA Ampere A100 80 GB PCIe) with 512 GB RAM.  The compute nodes are all interconnected on a fast Infiniband network that also connects to the local storage.  Each compute node has access to user home storage (25 GB),  work storage for use during computation (180 TB), and staging storage for use between compute runs (180 TB ).  Additionally, larger and longer-term storage is available as a research computing core.  At launch, the cluster offered more than 400 software modules. 

Kennesaw State University (KSU) has deployed a new high-capacity storage system as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Campus Cyberinfrastructure award. The system runs on Ceph and offers a total raw capacity of 6.5 petabytes (PB), which, after applying erasure coding for redundancy and fault tolerance, results in approximately 4.27PB of usable storage. Of this usable capacity, 30% (1.28PB) is designated as an Open Science Data Federation (OSDF) data origin, enabling the hosting of datasets from external researchers and facilitating the sharing of KSU-generated datasets to support national research initiatives. 70% (2.99PB) is allocated for KSU researchers, supporting scientific research and educational activities across both campuses. This storage is available in 1TB increments. The storage system is accessible to KSU researchers via desktop devices and the virtual high-performance computing (vHPC) environment as an SMB share, available through a secure VPN portal. The OSDF portion supports both public dataset sharing and private research collaborations, enhancing KSU’s role in national and global research efforts.