The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Next Tier Connect have announced that PSC will locate its next fleet of supercomputers in Next Tier Connect – Pittsburgh East. Located at 4350 Northern Pike, Monroeville, PA, Next Tier Connect – Pittsburgh East is comprised of a single 505,000 square foot building that was originally developed by Westinghouse as a high security, high reliability research center supported by dual utility feeds, backup generation and high-speed fiber connectivity.
Next Tier HD specializes in the development of high density data centers serving the academic research community and recently developed Georgia Tech's High Performance Computing Center located in Midtown Atlanta. Next Tier HD was drawn to the Monroeville campus by the opportunity to a similar level of support to the PSC in the expansion of its own supercomputing resources.
The PSC was created by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to provide the national research community and the western Pennsylvania region with the massive computational capacity required for computation intensive research. The PSC collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in securing the $10 million Bridges-2 grant. While the Bridges-2 grant will provide academic researchers access to the resulting compute capacity at no cost, a portion of that capacity will be available to the private sector at cost-recovery rate.
“Researchers today need new, scalable ways for combining large, complex data with high-performance simulation and modeling, and Bridges-2 will take the next step in pioneering converged, scalable high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and data,” said Nick Nystrom, PSC’s chief scientist and principal investigator (PI) for Bridges-2.
“Bridges-2’s community data collections and user-friendly interfaces are designed to democratize participation in science and engineering and foster collaboration and convergence research. The Bridges-2 project includes bringing the benefits of scalable data analytics and AI to industry, developing STEM talent to strengthen the nation’s workforce and broadening collaborations to accelerate discovery,” said Nystrom.
“The NSF is funding Bridges-2 as part of a series of awards for Advanced Computing Systems & Services, and we are honored that the PSC would entrust us with the responsibility of housing those systems on our campus. Our team is already working on the improvements that will be necessary to bring those supercomputers online in the summer of 2020,” said Jim Coakley, senior managing partner, Next Tier Connect.
