ICER Supercomputer Buy-In TIME-SENSITIVE - Deadline April 7 2020
Dear Colleagues,
The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research is preparing to purchase a new supercomputer. As a consequence, I am writing to you regarding the opportunity to buy into this machine, with a request for an answer with a very short turnaround time - no later than the end of the day next Tuesday, April 7th. Details of the available hardware, the buy-in program, and instructions for completing a purchase are all in the PDF linked here.
To summarize the situation: due to COVID-19 and the resulting financial chaos, we have a very limited window of opportunity to purchase computational hardware at an extremely compelling price - less than $6K for a 128 compute core/512 GB compute node, and similarly strong prices for higher-memory nodes. We also have GPU nodes available.
Unfortunately, we have to get back to the vendor next week with our final numbers. To that end, if you are interested in participating in the ICER HPCC buy-in, I am asking you to inform us as soon as possible what you wish to purchase. Please appreciate that we cannot guarantee that you will have the option to purchase hardware at this price at a later date, so if you have the option to purchase hardware now it is to your advantage to do so. Note that we are perfectly happy for multiple investigators to split the cost of one or more nodes!
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at oshea@msu.edu. I apologize for the short turnaround time!
Regards,
Brian O’Shea
Director, Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research