ACRES – Accelerating Computational Research for Engineering and Science

Concepts

A Shared Resource ACRES is a shared compute cluster available for use by all Clarkson faculty members and their research teams to support sponsored research. ACRES is open to the…

Technical Specifications

In A Nutshell ACRES features 62 compute-nodes, 2440 CPU cores, 8TB of total memory, and four (4) GPUs—for a total computing power of more than 160 teraflops. ACRES includes a…

The condominium model For users who need more than casual access to a shared computing environment, OIT also offers faculty members the possibility to purchase additional dedicated resources to augment…

Why Use ACRES?

Using ACRES for your work provides many advantages over individual solutions: hosted in an on-premises, state-of-the-art datacenter, the ACRES cluster is powered and cooled by installations that are optimized for scientific computing.

On ACRES, simulations and workloads benefit from performance levels that only large scale HPC systems can offer: high-performance I/O infrastructure, large volumes of storage, a wide variety of hardware configurations, GPU accelerators, centralized system administration and management provided by the Office of Information Technology (OIT).

Such features are not easily accessible at the departmental level, and often require both significant initial investments and recurring costs. Joining ACRES allows researchers and faculty members to avoid those costs and benefit from economies of scale, as well as to access larger, professionally managed computing resources that would not be available on an individual or even departmental basis.

How Much Does It Cost?

ACRES is free to use for anyone conducting departmental or sponsored research and limited academic coursework at Clarkson. Any faculty member can request access for research purposes, and get an account with a base storage allocation and unlimited compute time on the global, shared pool of resources.

In case those free resources are not sufficient, Clarkson provides faculty with the opportunity to purchase from a catalog of recommended configurations, for the use of their research teams. Using a traditional compute cluster condominium model, participating faculty and their teams get priority access to the resources they purchase. When they're idle, those resources are available to use by other users of the cluster.

Acknowledgement / Citation

It is important and expected that publications resulting from computations performed on ACRES acknowledge this. The following wording is suggested:

Some of the computing for this project was performed on the ACRES cluster. We would like to thank Clarkson University and the Office of Information Technology for providing computational resources and support that contributed to these research results. Additional computational resources for this grant were provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1925596.

Acknowledgement

Concepts

Technical Specifications

Ownership