EPIC: An Energy-Efficient, High-Performance GPGPU Computing Research Infrastructure

TL;DR

EPIC is a specialized GPGPU computing infrastructure at NTNU designed to provide high-performance, energy-efficient resources that enable researchers to conduct large-scale, data-parallel experiments more efficiently than before.

Contribution

The paper introduces EPIC, a new GPGPU infrastructure at NTNU, addressing resource scarcity and enabling advanced research in computationally intensive fields.

Findings

Enables large-scale GPGPU research at NTNU

Reduces time-to-solution for complex simulations

Supports energy-efficient high-performance computing

Abstract

The pursuit of many research questions requires massive computational resources. State-of-the-art research in physical processes using simulations, the training of neural networks for deep learning, or the analysis of big data are all dependent on the availability of sufficient and performant computational resources. For such research, access to a high-performance computing infrastructure is indispensable. Many scientific workloads from such research domains are inherently parallel and can benefit from the data-parallel architecture of general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). However, GPGPU resources are scarce at Norway's national infrastructure. EPIC is a GPGPU enabled computing research infrastructure at NTNU. It enables NTNU's researchers to perform experiments that otherwise would be impossible, as time-to-solution would simply take too long.