NJIT and DataBank Launch High Performance Computing Environment

New Jersey Institute of Technology's (NJIT) new high performance computing environment, built through a partnership with DataBank, a leading provider of enterprise-class colocation, connectivity and managed services, is now live in DataBank’s Piscataway, N.J. data center (EWR2) and will support NJIT's research efforts.

“Research has propelled NJIT’s growth as a leading national university, and partnering with Databank will dramatically improve the performance of our research computing environment,” said Atam Dhawan, interim provost and senior executive vice president. “This partnership supports NJIT’s research mission to advance the knowledge base through new discoveries, and basic, applied and translational research and technology development.” 

Built by Dell, the computing environment — named Wulver — provides a total of 127 compute nodes or servers, each with two AMD EPYC 64-core processors and 512GB RAM. Two of these nodes are upgraded to 2TB RAM while 25 nodes are enhanced with 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs each. In total, Wulver provides 16256 CPUs with 68TB memory, 100 GPUs and a theoretical peak performance in excess of 1.5PFLOPs (1.5 quadrillion floating point operations per second), approximately three times the peak performance of the existing cluster, Lochness. 

NJIT’s steady rise in research activity and output has necessitated the upgrade. NJIT is one of only 146 universities nationwide to earn the R1 ranking by Carnegie Classification — the highest research designation — and one of just three R1 universities in New Jersey. Research expenditures have surpassed $160 million, up nearly $70 million since 2010. NJIT comprises 150 research institutes, centers, and laboratories, up from 31 in 2010.

The university aims for national and international prominence in research through new discoveries in areas ranging from medical sensors and devices to robotics, to nanotechnology, to cybersecurity, to next-generation materials, among other topics of vital importance in basic, applied and translational research. Five research clusters exist within the research enterprise of NJIT: Bioscience and Bioengineering; Data Science and Management; Environment and Sustainability; Materials Science and Engineering; and Robotics and Machine Learning.

DataBank and NJIT will celebrate the opening of its HPC environment at the Databank campus May 31.

For more information about available services at Databank’s colocation facilities, visit databank.com.