Letter From the Director Cluster Buy-in

Dear colleagues,

The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research is in the midst of buying a new cluster in order to increase our computing capacity. I’m writing to you regarding the opportunity to buy CPU and/or GPU nodes for this machine, with a request for commitments by no later than October 4, 2022. Details of the available hardware, the buy-in program, and instructions for completing a purchase are all available on ICER’s buy-in webpage.

To summarize the situation: due to rapid increases in vendor pricing we have purchased a significant (but finite) quantity of hardware with the expectation that we will resell it to MSU users. To that end, both the CPU and GPU nodes listed on the webpage are available at the listed price on a first come, first served basis. If demand for hardware exceeds the number of nodes ICER has purchased we will make a second hardware acquisition, although we expect that the node prices in this later acquisition will be significantly higher. Researchers whose requests are late enough that they would end up in the second acquisition will have the opportunity to back out of the purchase if the node costs are outside of their budget. Note also that multiple investigators may split the cost of one or more nodes to serve as a shared resource!

If you are interested in participating in the ICER cluster buy-in please do so by filling out the Google Form linked on the webpage above. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at oshea@msu.edu - I’m happy to chat electronically or in person.

Regards,
Brian O'Shea
Director, ICER