The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) has unveiled a virtual tour of its Coda datacenter. The tour includes 360-degree looks at two supercomputers, including the shiny new Phoenix cluster, which is expected to make its Top500 debut in just a few days.

The Coda walkthrough is one of the featured tours for high school and undergraduate students as part of SC20 – and it’s also one of the latest in a series of virtual tours of supercomputing centers that have come online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of the year, similar tours have sprung up for the Hawk system at the High-Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart (HLRS); the MareNostrum system at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC); and Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With events staying virtual and many centers closed to public access, the virtual tours have offered a 2020-suitable alternative for students and educators.

Unlike the Hawk, MareNostrum and Summit tours, the Coda walkthrough does not use the Matterport platform, instead opting for Kuula. The walkthrough allows users to virtually “look around” a series of 360-degree snapshots of the space, interact with information points to learn more and click arrows to move from snapshot to snapshot. 

“The Coda ecosystem is designed as a future-forward workplace enabling unique collaborations and partnerships between higher education and industry – both established and start-up,” Georgia Tech wrote. “The overall theme is the nexus of CI, data sciences, and discovery focusing on HPC/HTC, ‘big data’ storage and analytics capabilities, and leadership class network services including research and education (R&E) backbone access.”

“The Coda Data Center is the new home for PACE [the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment], offering increased room for expansion and allowing for much higher power density per rack — an important consideration for growth in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence that benefit from GPUs and other computational accelerators. The facility has expansion capability up to 9-10 megawatts of power in a modular fashion, enabling a dynamic response to evolving needs. Along with the Office Tower, the Data Center serves as a highly-instrumented Technology Showcase/Living Lab with access to complete operational data that is captured and available for researchers.”

Coda hosts a variety of systems. The newest among them is the heterogeneous Phoenix cluster, a collaboration between Penguin Computing, Intel, Mellanox and Nvidia that features Cascade Lake CPUs, Nvidia Volta and Quadro Pro GPUs and which, according to Georgia Tech, delivers over 1.8 Linpack petaflops of computing power. Phoenix supports “data-driven work in astrophysics, biology, health science, chemistry, materials and manufacturing, public policy, among other disciplines.”

Coda is also home to the Hive supercomputer (also from Penguin/Intel/Mellanox/Nvidia), which delivers 0.7 Linpack petaflops of computing power, and a series of Instructional Cluster Environment (ICE) clusters, which support HPC coursework at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech says that Coda also hosts a yet-to-be-fully deployed Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) cluster.

The datacenter employs a range of sustainability measures, including waste heat recapture for heating the offices; a local microgrid that involves fuel cells, battery storage, and micro-turbines; and higher operating datacenter temperatures to reduce cooling needs.

Outside of Coda, Georgia Tech also operates Octavius, a 16-node HPE Apollo 80 Arm cluster that stands as one of the first A64FX systems in the country. Octavius is hosted in the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH), which boasts a collection of new and unique computing hardware called the “Rogues Gallery.” Georgia Tech will be hosting an HPC poster session, sponsored by PACE, on Monday, November 16th, including discussion areas for CRNCH and Georgia Tech’s Women in HPC chapter.

To access the virtual tour of Coda and its systems, click here.

Header image: the Hive supercomputer, as seen in the virtual tour.