2019 MSU HPC Buy-in Survey

Dear MSU researcher,

ICER is planning to make a purchase of computational hardware in the next several months, to be deployed in summer 2020.  We are attempting to gauge interest in participation in this HPC buy-in, as well as the types of hardware that we will offer for purchase.

Broadly speaking, researchers buy one or more compute nodes that are guaranteed to be available for use by your research group within 4 hours, with ICER providing all power, cooling, and physical and software administration of those nodes.  In return, when your group is not using the nodes, other users in the MSU community can use them for a period of up to four hours. We plan to offer a limited set of options for node buy-in, which may include basic computing nodes, GPU nodes, nodes with large amounts of memory, and possibly other offerings.  Please consult the memo describing the 2018 buy-in to get a sense of previous offerings and prices, which can be found at https://icer.msu.edu/users/buy-options .  We anticipate that the next buy-in will have similar per-node costs, although with more powerful nodes.

If you are potentially interested in participating in the HPC buy-in, please take a few minutes of your time to indicate that by filling out this short survey by no later than November 15, 2019: https://msu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_08r0Z8PG2zj86rz .  The information that you provide will be critical to informing the Request for Proposals that we will issue to potential vendors.  Thank you!

Brian O’Shea
Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research
Director