Last November, Purdue University’s Anvil supercomputer began operations with early user testing. Now, the university says, the supercomputer has completed testing and is fully operational. Anvil offers 5.3 peak petaflops of computing power and is allocable via the NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Anvil is already being put to use on a variety of projects at Purdue.

Anvil, built in partnership with Dell and AMD, has three sub-clusters. First, its main cluster, which boasts 1,000 nodes, each with dual AMD Epyc Milan CPUs and 256GB of memory; second, a cluster of 32 large-memory nodes with 1TB of memory each; and third, a 16-node GPU cluster with four Nvidia A100 GPUs and 512GB of memory per node. The nodes are networked with Nvidia InfiniBand HDR100 and supported by more than 3PB of flash storage and 10PB of additional storage. Anvil has not yet appeared on the Top500.

“Anvil is not only the largest capacity system Purdue has ever built, it’s the most diverse,” said Carol Song, senior research scientist for ITaP Research Computing and principal investigator and project director for the Anvil system, in an interview with Purdue’s Amy Raley. “Its various components are all integrated in one place with GPUs and large memory nodes complementing a cluster of 1,000 compute nodes. As Anvil grows, it is also able to take on much more heterogeneous workflows that are more common in the research happening today at Purdue.”

Purdue highlighted a few of these research projects in its announcement. One researcher is using Anvil’s GPUs to accelerate molecular dynamics simulations of an important protein that is used as a drug target for heart failure therapeutics. “Using CPUs this work could take months, if not years,” said Yinglong Miao, lead researcher on the project and an assistant professor at the University of Kansas. “With the GPUs on Anvil, we can run these simulations much faster. Instead of needing months, we just need a couple of weeks.”

Another project, led by a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue, is using Anvil to study the aerodynamic heating produced by high-speed flights; yet another is using the system to advance digital city planning.

Beyond Anvil’s accessibility via XSEDE, Purdue is committing 10 percent of the supercomputer’s time to “high-impact initiatives,” including research partnerships with industry clients. Purdue says that Anvil is so named to reflect its students’ “strength and workmanlike focus on producing results,” and that the system, accordingly, will also serve as an experiential learning laboratory for students.

To learn more about Anvil, read the reporting from Purdue’s Amy Raley.