The vision for ACCRE originated with the VUPAC cluster built in 1994 and expanded over the years by Vanderbilt physicists. By the end of its life as a useful production facility, VUPAC was a cluster of roughly 50 workstations loosely coupled together to provide a (very coarse) parallel computing environment.
In the late 1990s, Paul Sheldon in Physics and Astronomy joined forces with Jason Moore in Human Genetics and spearheaded the building of the Vanderbilt MultiProcessor Integrated Research Engine (VAMPIRE). VAMPIRE was a 55-node Linux cluster first put into service in July 2001 with assistance from ITS. Alan Tackett, a computational theoretical physicist, was brought on board to provide technical expertise and vision. VAMPIRE was intended to be a proof-of-concept project. It proved that many groups from diverse disciplines with differing compute problems can equitably share a cluster. This test cluster allowed many issues to be resolved, including the type of software to ensure equitable sharing, correct installation of the operating system, system maintenance for a large number of nodes, how to ensure the hardware works properly and how to monitor all the nodes.
VAMPIRE was successful: numerous publications resulted from calculations performed with the cluster and cross-fertilization between the disciplines was even greater than anticipated. VAMPIRE could no longer provide enough computing for the needs of all the researchers involved. While efforts to secure funding for a much larger compute cluster continued, funding from many researchers, but primarily from Ron Schrimpf and Peter Cummings in the School of Engineering, provided funding for the next generation of the compute cluster: a 120-node Linux cluster purchased in 2003, which remained in service until March 2008.
With the success of VAMPIRE and the support of a large group of researchers, the proposal for the entity now known as ACCRE was submitted to the Academic Venture Capital Fund of Vanderbilt University. An $8.3 million grant was received to transform the cluster into a University-wide resource capable of meeting the needs of any researcher on campus. The scope of the operation was expanded from a compute cluster to also include data storage and data visualization capabilities. Funding was secured in late 2003 and planning begun to establish the physical infrastructure and personnel for this task.
AVCF funding allowed the staff to be expanded so that the compute cluster services could be offered to all Vanderbilt researchers. New services were added including a helpdesk system called Request Tracker, evening and weekend on-call assistance for problems impacting the entire cluster, daily office hours, and training workshops. Guest accounts are available for all Vanderbilt-affiliated researchers. Once the cluster has proven to be successful in a field of research, that research group is encouraged to join the co-op since ACCRE is a grassroots operation developed by and for Vanderbilt faculty.
AVCF funds were also used to begin expanding the cluster in Spring 2004 but the first major expansion of the compute cluster for ACCRE occurred in August 2004, approximately five years after the VAMPIRE cluster began. An NIH compute grant for $1.5 million was successfully secured to provide extensive computing capacity for all NIH-funded researchers in the School of Medicine. Hardware for that grant, under the leadership of Dave Piston, was purchased throughout fiscal year 2005.
The focus of ACCRE was also expanded beyond the cluster in 2004 into visualization and data storage. AVCF funding purchased state-of-the-art data visualization facilities that are operated by Vanderbilts Center for Structural Biology. ACCRE personnel evaluated the storage needs of Vanderbilt researchers and products available to meet those needs and could not find an off-the-shelf system to meet the needs of many researchers. The process of developing in-house a new distributed storage system began in late 2004. The new system called L-Store provides a flexible logistical storage framework for distributed, scalable, and secure access to data for a wide spectrum of users. Vanderbilt research groups began using this storage system as early beta testers in January 2007. During this same time period, a wide area storage network called the Research and Education Data Depot Network (REDDnet) was launched in 2006 to support data-intensive collaboration among researchers, teachers, and students who are distributed across Internet 2 and other research networks.
The cluster is currently composed of over 1400 processors with three generations of hardware: AMD Opteron X86 dual processors nodes, IBM Power PC dual processor blades, and dual core, dual processor AMD Opteron nodes. New hardware is added to the cluster based on contributions from researchers as required to meet their computing needs.
Last modified: June 16 2008 16:42:35 CST.
