March 1, 2017

The OCF wants to hear from anyone who is interested in the possibility of participating in a free high-performance computing (HPC) service that we will be offering starting next academic year. Our eventual goal is to make intensive computational facilities student-run and freely avilable for all students and researchers in the UC Berkeley community.

Our current, tentative itinerary is to make an initial hardware purchase by the end of the spring 2017 semester, then purchase additional hardware in the fall based on input from interested parties and feedback from a trial run in the summer or early fall. Depending on the success of the service after it launches for the entire campus, we will consider expanding it in future years to accommodate even more projects of varying sizes and needs. To that end, we have created a survey for those who might like to see their project run on OCF hardware:

OCF HPC interest form

To anyone who may consider hosting a current or future project on our open computer infrastructure, we urge you to fill out this survey as best as you can, using estimations if you do not have all the hard data. We want to see the full breadth of projects on campus that have unmet computing needs. Our first server is planned to feature multiple high-end graphics cards, a many-core CPU, and spacious quantities of RAM and storage, but we will need as much input as we can get to make informed decisions if we want to make high-performance computing a reality for as many as possible.

To student groups in particular, we would like to select a few candidates for our trial run on limited hardware. We will use our experience on this outing to iron out wrinkles and anticipate obstacles that may come up during a full run. If this sounds interesting to you, please let us know in your response.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us!