Stony Brook’s Ookami supercomputer testbed, located in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), recently became part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support) program, which focuses on making high-performance computing resources and memory-intensive capabilities available to research scientists around the world.
Ookami, in operation since 2020, is supported by the NSF and was the first to employ the revolutionary A64fx processor launched in 2019 by Fujitsu and Riken, a scientific research institute in Japan. This powerful technology is used in the Fugaku supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, which was the fastest machine in the world until June 2022, a distinction it had held the previous two years.
According to Eva Siegmann, lead research scientist at IACS, the inspiration for Ookami was to bring Fugaku’s world-class capabilities to the Stony Brook campus and make it available to a broad research community.
“The motivation was to have a similar system with the same technology as in Fugaku here in the US and make it easily available to researchers for their own applications,” said Siegmann.
Siegmann said the name “Ookami” — the Japanese word for “wolf” — was chosen as both an homage to the origin of the process and to the Stony Brook University community of “Seawolves.” Ookami is the first open deployment of this technology outside of Japan, and is available not only to Stony Brook researchers, but to scientists around the world. Siegmann said there are currently around 90 active projects using the technology.
“We work with several disciplines,” she said. “For example, we have researchers doing astrophysics, simulating the explosion of stars. Some other applications on the system include oceanic weather and climate simulations, condensed matter applications, machine learning as well as linguistics. Ookami is valuable to anyone in the field of computational research.”
Siegmann said she works closely with resource groups, helping to port their software and tune it for maximum performance.
“The performance of Ookami can be much better than conventional systems while simultaneously using less power,” she said. “An open cluster like Ookami is a huge asset for the high-performance computing world.”
— Robert Emproto
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