SInce its inception in 2013, VIDIA has been in continuous use by SUNY students and faculty for teaching courses and workshops, hosting datasets, and launching computational jobs on the CCR cluster. We support the computing behind scholarship and teaching in areas from Biochemistry to Computational Physics to Wildlife Biology to Social Science. VIDIA is hosted at the Center for Computational Research (CCR), a leading academic supercomputing facility.

VIDIA under the hood

The VIDIA site is powered by the HUBzero® Platform for Scientific Collaboration, a UC San Diego project. The platform was designed to help a scientific community share resources and work together. A hub enables researchers and educators to collaborate in private spaces to build simulation/modeling tools, run cluster jobs, gather datasets, and share them online for teaching and research. Users can launch computations and view results with an ordinary web browser, without having to download, compile, or install any code. These powerful graphical tools support visualization and comparison of results.

How Does VIDIA Differ From a Web Site?

At its core, VIDIA, a science gateway, is a web site built with many familiar open source packages--the Linux operating system, an Apache web server, a MySQL database, PHP web scripting, and a Joomla-inspired content management system. The HUBzero software builds upon that infrastructure to create an environment in which researchers, educators, and students can access simulation tools and share information. Specifically, a "hub" like VIDIA is a web-based collaboration environment with the following features:

• interactive simulation tools right in your browser
• simulation tool development area, with source code control and bug tracking
• videos and supporting media for classes, tutorials, and documentation
• groups and projects for private collaboration
• mechanisms for sharing resources
• user-submitted resource ratings and feedback
• user support area
• statistics about usage patterns

Introducing CCR

The Center for Computational Research (CCR), a leading academic supercomputing facility, hosts and maintains VIDIA. CCR is best known for:

• high-performance computing (HPC) facilities
• high-end visualization laboratories
• cloud computing research environment
• support staff with expertise in computing, visualization, and networking

CCR Facilities

The Center’s extensive computing facilities, which are housed in a state-of-the-art 4000 square foot machine room, include an academic Linux cluster with more than 10000 processor cores and QDR Infiniband. Our industrial partners have access to a cluster with more than 3400 processor cores and FDR Infiniband. The Center maintains a 3PB IBM GPFS high-performance parallel file system. Our computer visualization laboratory features a tiled display wall, and a VisDuo passive stereo system. Approved VIDIA users can run their own computations on the CCR academic computing cluster.

A leading academic supercomputing facility, CCR has more than 170 Tflops of peak performance compute capacity.

CCR Staff

CCR staff provide researchers and their students with support in algorithm and scientific code development, efficient execution of their codes on HPC resources, and scientific visualization. Our computational scientists, programmers, and database administrators with expertise in all areas of computing, including:

• scientific and parallel computing
• high-capacity data storage
• custom software development
• advanced database engineering
• grid and cloud computing
• scientific visualization
• networking

CCR staff have extensive experience developing virtual organizations and analysis tools for high-performance computing users. Our expertise stems from involvement with grid computing, in projects such as XSEDE and Open Science Grid, and XDMoD, and with collaborative virtual community building through the VHub HUBzero-based project.

Please contact us to find out about creating an account on VIDIA!