New Amarel resources available soon

The Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC) has begun purchasing its annual hardware, compute nodes, and storage assets for Amarel, a high-performance computer cluster designed to serve the university research community.

Availability of these Amarel Phase IV resources is expected by mid to late summer, 2020.

More computing power

Each of the new compute nodes will include the following:

• 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6230R (Cascade Lake) Processors (35.75MB cache, 2.10GHz): 2933 MHz DDR4 memory 26-core processors (52 cores/node)
• 12x16GB DIMMS (192GB/node)
• 480GB SSD on-board drive
• 10GigE and Infiniband HDR (100Gb/s) adapters

The price of $7,200 per node includes a four-year warranty. New owners receive 1 complimentary terabyte of storage with their first purchase.

More storage

• The high-speed storage component of Phase IV will provide an additional four petabytes of storage for the ever-increasing data demands of Rutgers investigators.
• Storage in this phase of Amarel costs $150 per terabyte.

Why use Amarel?

The Amarel computing cluster — which is named for the former Rutgers professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Saul Amarel — allows Rutgers researchers to access world-class computing power without the need to buy and maintain their own hardware.

The architectural approach followed by OARC assures the continuity of each new phase with earlier Amarel phases, but it also allows new phases to take advantage of increased core counts, improved energy efficiency, and reduced cost per unit of compute. OARC coordinates with the Office of Information Technology’s data-center staff on power and other environmental requirements for each new Amarel phase or expansion of the current phase.

Why buy Amarel?

While general-access Amarel use is free to the entire Rutgers community, owners have the highest priority and are guaranteed access commensurate with their investment. Owner allocations are designed to feel as close to a locally maintained and managed system as possible, but unused cycles are available to the general pool. Free access is available on a first-come, first-served basis to the Rutgers community, utilizing general pooled resources under an open-access policy. Non-owner jobs can be preempted immediately by higher priority jobs.