Kristin Lepping
Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 11:09 am

Rutgers Faculty and Research Computing Community,

The Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC) is producing a plan for the upcoming Amarel Phase III compute and storage equipment purchase. We are asking for your input to gauge researcher interest in becoming or adding to Amarel ownership. If you believe you will benefit from becoming an Amarel owner within the next fiscal year, or wish to increase your current owner allocation, please help us determine the best quantity of equipment to buy on behalf of the greater community by letting us know.

While details and exact pricing are yet to be determined, current expectation of Phase III standard node configuration is:
2X Intel Xeon Cascade 6230 Processors: 2.666MHz DDR4 memory, 22 MB L3 cache, 20-core processors (40 cores/node), 192GB RAM (12 x 16GB DIMMS), 960GB SSD on-board drive, GigE and Infiniband EDR (100Gb/s) adapters

With regard to Phase III compute performance, we’d like to bring your attention to the VNNI (vector neural network instructions) which Intel has added as part of the Cascade Lake generation. VNNI may significantly improve performance in AI/machine learning applications.

FY20 pricing for the above is expected to be approximately $7,100 per node with a four-year warranty (subject to change based on vendor selection).

In addition, as announced in the attached March email, we will soon be adding a number of consumer GPU servers to the Amarel cluster. Information regarding the GPU servers is attached.

About Ownership:
– Amarel owners (e.g., individuals, departments, institutes) always have dedicated, immediate access to purchased resources
– Buying-in to Amarel with our standard 4-year ownership plan is considered an equipment purchase with no indirect costs
– Extremely low pricing is achieved through multi-vendor negotiations and OARC provides administration, power, cooling, rack space, network access

For more information on both Phase III and the consumer GPUs, or to discuss your interest in becoming an Amarel owner, contact us at help@oarc.rutgers.edu. Thank you!
– Kristin

Kristin Lepping, MIS
Director, Business Operations, Grants, and Workforce Development