Expanse Early User Program

The Expanse Early User Program (EUP) provides an opportunity for users to port, tune and optimize applications on SDSC’s upcoming Expanse supercomputer. Each Expanse standard compute node is powered by two 64-core AMD EPYC 7742 processors with 256 GB of DDR4 memory. Each GPU node contains four NVIDIA V100s (32 GB SMX2), connected via NVLINK, and dual 20-core Intel Xeon 6248 CPUs. Expanse also has four 2 TB large memory nodes.

During the EUP, users will have access to the full application and software library stack to build and test their applications, user support, and related documentation.

The Expanse filesystems are separate from the Comet filesystems and data mover nodes will be available to support data transfer between these systems.

An Expanse 101 webinar is planned early in this period so that users can get information on the software environment and running jobs on the system.

 

Application Process

Access to the Expanse EUP will be granted via a lightweight proposal submitted via the XSEDE allocations system, XRAS.

If you have an existing XSEDE grant, access to the Early User Program will be available as an Action request,  called Early User Period.

If you don't have an existing XSEDE grant, access to the Early User Program will be through an XSEDE startup allocation request.

Requirements

The Expanse EUP will be limited to a 30-day period with the following requirements and goals:

      • Proposals should provide details on the planned tests during the EUP period, including the applications that will be used and any dependencies needed, the anticipated workload (number of cores, duration, number of jobs, number of simultaneious jobs),  which should fit in the 30-day period, and anticipated scientific progress.
      • The Expanse team will be working with users to debug performance and other issues. Users should agree to provide formal feedback that will be use as part of our acceptance and transition to operations. At the end of the EUP, you will be asked to complete a short survey that addresses usability, reliability, and science enabled during the testing.
      • Given the short test period, proposing teams must be ready to start simulations and commit to making use of the time during this phase as soon as system access is granted.

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