CyberSTAR

CyberSTAR - A Scalable Terascale Advanced Resource for Discovery through Computing

National Science Foundation: Major Research Instrumentation, Office of CyberInfrastructure
Award Number #0821527

• CyberSTAR Home
• FACULTY/STUDENTS:
  Request a User Account
• Specifications
• PI's & Senior Personnel
• Intellectual Merits
• Broader Impact
• Proposed Instrument Schematic (PDF)
• Publication Acknowledgement
• CyberSTAR Users Guide

 
User accounts are now available for faculty and students associated with the NSF MRI project.

This project brings together researchers from seven disciplines (biological, materials and social sciences, computer and information science, engineering, education and geosciences) in collaborative research toward discovery and design through computing.

Research projects concern:

• predictive network modeling of infectious disease dynamics
• developing new piezoelectric materials
• designing next-generation computer systems
• modeling human interactions to promote learning in virtual communities, and
• developing a critical zone environmental observatory.

Despite their diversity, these projects share computational scalability challenges to be addressed for enabling scientific advances that often depend on solving large problems representing a sufficient level of detail and complexity. The instrument will form the core of a multidisciplinary collaborative environment to enable transformative approaches to address the challenges of scaling at multiple levels.

It will support a set of integrated research, education, training, and outreach activities to:

1. enable collaborative scaling across projects through the transfer of scaling approaches from one domain into another, while addressing algorithmic, system, or instrument scaling challenges within individual projects
2. promote technology-transfer through industrial partnerships, and
3. grow and enhance the diversity of the limited computational science talent pool.

We propose to acquire a scalable computational instrument for enabling discovery through computing. The instrument is a peak Terascale networked computing system with a high resolution digital display wall for visualization and a high bandwidth parallel storage system (view the proposed schematic). The computing system incorporates architectural and functional heterogeneity in the form of reconfigurable computing, graphical processing unit accelerators and chip multiprocessors and their clusters. The instrument is critical for serving the computational requirements of the underlying applications to advance design and discovery through virtual experiments. The instrument mirrors the complexity of future Petascale systems - consequently the iso-efficient scaling realized by applications on this instrument could potentially be sustained to solve grand challenge problems at the Petascale.

This project is supported by the Major Research Instrumentation Program from the National Science Foundation through Award Number #0821527and several Penn State units including the Office of the Sr. Vice President for Research, the Institute for CyberScience, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Materials Research Institute, the College of Engineering, the Eberly College of Science, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Information Technology Services.