Jetstream2, a collaborative cloud HPC system spread across five institutions, has entered full production following an early operations phase that began earlier this year. The computer — which now serves a broad research community — delivers an aggregate eight peak petaflops.

“Jetstream is a cloud!” proclaims a red alert box on the system’s overview page. “While it shares many common features and abilities with other research computing resources, it is not a traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) or High Throughput Computing (HTC) environment.”

Indeed, Jetstream2’s hardware — supported by an NSF grant — is split into five segments, all built by Dell: a primary system at Indiana University Bloomington (416 compute nodes, 90 GPU nodes, and 96 storage nodes) and four smaller systems at Arizona State University, Cornell University, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the University of Hawai’i (each with 8 compute nodes and 2 GPU nodes). Additional partners for the system include Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Jetstream2’s standard compute nodes (of which there are 384 total) are each equipped with dual AMD Epyc “Milan” 7713 CPUs and 512GB of memory, while 32 additional large-memory compute nodes with a terabyte of memory each. The 90 total GPU nodes have the same CPUs, 512GB of memory and quadruple Nvidia A100 GPUs. All told: around eight aggregate peak petaflops of cloud compute power supported by 17PB of storage.

As the name implies, Jetstream2 follows in the footsteps of Jetstream, which launched in 2016, consisting of 640 Intel Haswell-based nodes split between IU and TACC with an additional deployment of 16 development nodes at the University of Arizona.

“Like its predecessor, Jetstream2 will continue to tear down barriers to discovery,” said John Fonner, director of special projects at TACC and one of the PIs on the Jetstream2 award, in an interview with TACC’s Faith Singer. “It will provide flexible advanced computing capabilities for researchers that may not otherwise have sufficient resources at their institutions. And it gives educators a consistent, accessible compute environment that they can bring into the classroom.”

Prior to entering production this summer, Jetstream2 went through an early operations phase in February, during which time it was integrated into the NSF’s ACCESS program (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support), the successor to the popular XSEDE program.

“We intend Jetstream2 to be a democratizing force within the NSF ecosystem, allowing researchers and educators access to cutting-edge resources regardless of project scale,” said David Hancock, director of advanced cyberinfrastructure for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University.

To learn more about Jetstream2, read the reporting from TACC’s Faith Singer here.

Header image: the main Jetstream2 installation at IU Bloomington. Image courtesy of the university.