UBC has further expanded its support of the research community with an additional capital investment of $10.6 million in advanced research computing infrastructure.
This investment increases UBC’s capacity to support UBC researchers in all disciplines to meet immediate needs surrounding data storage and computing power through UBC ARC Sockeye. Sockeye was initially established through a capital investment of $7.9 million investment in 2018, and welcomed its first users in 2019 following a successful call for allocations in the fall.
This additional funding allows Sockeye to provide a high-performance computing platform with nearly 16,000 CPU cores, 200 GPUs, and up to 20 petabytes of highly resilient and fault-tolerant storage distributed between UBC’s Vancouver and Okanagan campuses, including 192 TB of high-performance all-flash storage.
The capital investment continues to complement the work of the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team with the following three main objectives:
- Provide access to local advanced research computing resources
- Provide dedicated resources and local capacity for health researchers to address health research data access challenges at UBC
- Accelerate investigation into and support for commercial cloud computing
Access to Sockeye will be particularly valuable for early-career researchers and new recruits who require “bridge” access to resources to establish their research at UBC. The investment also addresses the specific needs for secure and compliant storage and compute platforms for health researchers, facilitating greater collaboration.
“We would like to thank the UBC Board of Governors for their ongoing support through these capital investments totalling over $18 million,” says Steve Cundy, ARC Director. “This infrastructure is a crucial part in providing researchers across the university with the advanced research computing support they need.”
Researchers can access Sockeye through calls for allocation undertaken throughout the year. These calls are administered by ARC and overseen by UBC’s DRI Resource Allocation Committee.
For more information, please visit https://arc.ubc.ca/sockeye.