Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE)
Simply stated, the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) provides faculty participants a sustainable leading-edge high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure with technical support services. This frees faculty to focus on research while reducing their direct costs for HPC equipment and increasing productivity of students and postdocs.
PACE is a collaboration between Georgia Tech faculty and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) focused on HPC. This partnership is made possible as part of a long-term commitment by Georgia Tech to create an exemplary environment to advance Georgia Tech's leadership position in innovative research.
PACE provides a core suite of HPC services and resources available at no direct cost to faculty participants. These resources include:
- Infrastructure - data center space, power, cooling, racks, and all aspects of 24x7 data center operations
- Commodity Services - ethernet, high-speed scratch storage, back-ups, recovery, security
- Software - compliers, applications, license management
- Technical Services & Support - user support, hardware management, consulting, procurement
- Compute Clusters - multiple scalable clusters of shared nodes, including but not limited to Phoenix, Firebird, Buzzard and ICE
PACE also provides faculty the opportunity to leverage their investments in exclusively dedicated nodes by employing a federated model where dedicated nodes purchased by faculty are integrated into the PACE set of core services. Thus, participating faculty avoid the costs associated with these core services.
The library was the scientific enabler of the 20th century and all of the centuries before. High Performance Computing (HPC) are the libraries of the 21st century.
This bold assertion instills in us a heightened sense of responsibility to enable the world class students, researchers and innovators from various disciplines across the breadth and depth of Georgia Tech. It has also been said that, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” PACE exists to provide the necessary bridge between fast computers and brilliant humans that enables a powerful combination of the two. We do so by providing information technologies that free innovators from the operational burdens of HPC resources, allowing them and their students to focus on the bigger scientific discoveries and better engineering capabilities at the heart of human progress.
The Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) is a partnership between Georgia Tech faculty and the Office of Information Technology focused on HPC. Strong support from Georgia Tech's senior leadership enables PACE to provide infrastructure, software, and dedicated technical services for participating researchers, allowing them to focus their HPC investments primarily on compute nodes and expanded storage. In addition, all GT faculty can request access to the FoRCE Research Computing Environment which is a shared cluster that includes nodes, GPU's, and high-speed scratch storage.
Find out how to get started at PACE at our participation page.
A document describing our facilities for use in NSF or similar proposals is available here (PDF).
