Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
MSI Mission MSI is an academic unit of the University of Minnesota under the office of the Vice President for Research. The institute was created in 1984, and has a staff of approximately 50 full time employees. Mission To provide a broad range of High Performance Computing technologies and development environments to enable Science, Engineering, and Medical research and innovation.
MSI At a Glance Two data centers with over 3,700 sq ft of datacenter space and 1 MW of power available for IT. Four additional laboratories on campus, mostly serving the life sciences. Approximately 600 PI groups with over 3,300 users. Approximately 127M core-hours per year available to the research community. Dedicated resources for serial workflows, database management, and cloud access. Commercial and open-source software packages and research databases.
HPC Resources Itasca: HP Blade; Intel Nehalem EP + Sandybridge EP processors. Koronis: SGI UV; Intel Westmere processors. Calhoun: SGI Altix; Intel Clovertown processors. Cascade: 14-node cluster with GPU (Tesla and Kepler) and Intel PHI accelerators. - GPUT: 4 Linux servers; Xeon CPUs and Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 GPUs. Storage: Aggregate of 3.3 PB, including Panasas and Lustre. Network: 10-Gbps dedicated to campus core.
Advanced Visualization Power wall with 3 projector stereoscopic system and 12 projector high resolution system. Complement of high end servers and GPU visualization systems. InfiniBand connected to clusters interactive visualization. Seamless integration across all systems, down to remote visualization (laptop or tablet).
User Community
User Community
User Community - Informatics
HPC Research About 275 Principal Investigators use our highperformance computing resources spanning 63 departments and units across 17 colleges of the University. Research areas supported include: Computational Chemistry Physics: Astrophysics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Physics Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Materials Science Biochemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering Life Sciences: Bioinformatics, Drug Design, Imaging Environmental Science: Climate, Weather, Renewable Energy, Geophysics, Soil and Water MSI provides: HPC resources; data management and archiving; virtual-reality capabilities; and consulting for parallelization and performance tuning.
Application Development MSI has a team of software engineers that support cyberinfrastructure initiatives on campus, from large center to single PI. Proposal driven/fte recovery. Current initiatives supported include: NSF Cyberenabled Discovery and Innovation, Expeditions in Computing, Material Genome Initiative, Advances in Biological Informatics, etc. Clinical: CLIA, PHI computation, -omics.
Application Development Web applications to protect the food supply (National Center for Food Protection and Defense). MSI developed web-based tools for the the NCFPD to use to store and analyze data from the US Customs and Border Patrol, which monitors shipments of food into the US. Part of the project created visualizations of imported food using the Google Maps API, with which researchers can select countries and food products to see what is entering the country. The visualization below shows importation information for apples.
Virtual Reality for Surgical Training Remote surgical training. The goal of this project is to create an interactive, real-time virtual-reality simulation and visualization system that will allow surgeons to take part in training remotely.
Virtual Reality for Device Design Design of medical devices. This coordinated effort between MSI research groups is creating an integrated system for developing medical devices using virtual reality and supercomputers.
Data Mining Planetary Skin project. Identify and characterize global land use changes, and to integrate real time satellite data, land cover databases, and Google maps to develop a comprehensive global information system. Develop an Enhanced Vegetation Index (l: Summer, r: Winter 2000) Conversion to farmland Large-scale drought in South America Integrate into Google maps Forest fire detection
Informatics Support
Galaxy
HPC and Informatics Tools, environments and direct consulting have led to a large increase of HPC system use by Informatics groups
Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Web: www.msi.umn.edu Email: help@msi.umn.edu Telephone: (612) 626-0802 The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. This PowerPoint is available in alternative formats upon request. Direct requests to Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, 599 Walter library, 117 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455, 612-624-0528.