Serving the Special Demands of Science

Cloud computing is gaining a foothold in the business world, but can clouds meet the specialized needs of scientists? That’s the question NERSC’s Magellan cloud computing testbed is exploring.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),  the system is split between DOE centers: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Illinois. Both are running similar midrange hardware but in different operating environments. The combined set of systems will create a cloud testbed that scientists can use for their computations while also testing the effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems.

Magellan is purpose-built for the special requirements of scientific computing using technology and tool sets unavailable in commercial clouds, including

• High bandwidth, low-latency node interconnects (InfiniBand),
• High-bin processors tuned for performance,
• Preinstalled scientific applications, compilers, debuggers, math libraries and other tools,
• High-bandwidth parallel file system, and a
• High-capacity data archive.

Ferdinand Magellan was a 16th C. Portuguese explorer who lead the first expedition known to circumnavigate the globe. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two nearby galaxies, bear his name. We hope to honor that same spirit of discovery by stretching the bounds of scientific curiosity in a different kind of cloud.