The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $10 million to the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University (IU) in collaboration with University of Hawai‘i , University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Arizona State University (ASU) and Cornell University to deploy Jetstream 2, a nationwide distributed cloud computing system that supports on-demand research, artificial intelligence (AI) and enhanced large-scale data analysis.

“We are delighted and honored to be part of the Jetstream 2 project with a remarkable team of national collaborators,” said UH President David Lassner. “The focus on artificial intelligence and deep machine learning to support data-intensive scholarship will directly advance our research enterprise, educational opportunities for our students, and our work to diversify Hawaiʻi’s economy.”

Jetstream 2, an infrastructure project that will provide an 8 petaFLOPS (a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second) cloud computing system is designed to meet the growing needs of national science and engineering communities.

Consisting of five computational systems, Jetstream 2’s primary system will be located at IU, with four smaller regional systems deployed nationwide at partners ASU, Cornell, UH and TACC. Jetstream 2 will enable thousands of scientific products from a diverse group of scientists in need of interactive and on-demand computing rather than batch-style computation. In addition, Jetstream 2 makes high-performance computing and software more accessible to researchers, especially those from smaller academic communities with limited access to resources and less experience using supercomputing systems.

The new Jetstream 2 resources will be maintained by UH Information Technology Services Cyberinfrastructure and will empower research in the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute and across all 10 UH campuses.

“Jetstream 2 empowers our University of Hawai‘i community of researchers, faculty and students with access to the highest tiers of NSF’s national computing ecosystem, effectively democratizing access to these highly specialized, high-performance computing resources,” said UH Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Garret Yoshimi. “We look forward to leveraging the access afforded by Jetstream 2 to ensure our community can effectively collaborate with their peers across the nation, not simply from an on-ramp to the national computing ecosystem, but directly accessing the core infrastructure as if it were ʻlocal’ to our community.”

The primary system will use next-generation AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and 18.5 petabytes of storage and an aggregate processing capacity of 516 teraFLOPS for regional cloud systems.  

Additional Jetstream 2 partners include the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, with Dell Inc. as the primary supplier.

The Jetstream 2 project is funded under NSF award number 2005506. 

About Jetstream

The current Jetstream system was funded and lead by IU in 2014 and has offered cloud-based, on-demand computing and data analysis resources within the national Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment .

Jetstream is NSF’s first national production science and engineering research cloud system and is part of the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, offering resources in support of research related to finding a cure for the global pandemic.

About the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University

The Pervasive Technology Institute at IU is a collaborative organization designed to marshal IU’s computational experts and resources quickly in response to societal, research, and educational needs.  In partnership with IU’s University Information Technology Services (UITS), it also led the original Jetstream award.  PTI was established in 1999 by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment and has continued to lead productive uses and applications of research technologies for over 20 years.

About UH Information Technology Services Cyberinfrastructure and the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute

The UH Information Technology Services Cyberinfrastructure (ITS-CI) supports data-intensive research and scholarship across the UH 10 campus system with state of the art resources, services and expertise.   

ITS-CI maintains a 297 node (6309 core) high performance computing cluster, offers advanced computing consulting, and individual and group training. ITS-CI oversees the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute, a UH system-wide effort established in 2018 to support data science education, collaborative research and partnerships with industry.