Hardware Development
The iUTAH and CI-WATER EPSCoR projects resulted in an unprecedented level of collaboration and coordination in development of computational and storage resources to support the type of multi-institution research conducted by these projects. The following describe a few details of our major computer hardware acquisitions in support of the Utah EPSCoR program.
iUTAH Virtual Server Platform
We collaborated with the CI-WATER EPSCoR project and Utah State University’s Information Technology group to purchase and deploy two virtual server clusters and a shared storage environment within which iUTAH Cyberinfrastructure was deployed. The iUTAH virtual server platform takes advantage of the latest in hardware and software virtualization and enabled us to flexibly provision and deploy the diverse server environments, databases, and web applications needed to support iUTAH scientists. These clusters enabled hosting of production web applications and servers, provision of server and computational resources for iUTAH researchers and groups, and an effective research platform for staging and testing the innovative applications developed by the iUTAH Cyberinfrastructure Team.
iUTAH/CI-WATER Store
The iUTAH CI Team collaborated with the CI-WATER team on the design for a large-scale disk storage system that supported the large-scale storage needs of iUTAH and CI-WATER researchers’ work on high performance computing applications. This Petabyte disk storage array is hosted in the University of Utah’s state-of-the-art downtown Salt Lake City data center. In addition to supporting high performance computing applications through the joint University of Utah/Utah State University Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), the storage array was used as a redundant, offsite backup system for all production services and applications deployed at USU.
