The High Performance & Scientific Computing (HPSC) group can assist instructors at the University of Tennessee teaching academic courses by providing access to computing resources for student use for courses including access to reserved compute nodes, GPU nodes, and storage space. Academic resources can be provided by OIT HPSC on two clusters, ISAAC Next Generation (ISAAC-NG) and ISAAC Legacy, depending on the needs of the class. In general, ISAAC-NG has the newest Intel-based compute resources (up to Ice Lake), GPU nodes with Intel processors and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, many software components including Intel and Gnu compilers and libraries, petabyte-scale Lustre file system storage capabilities, and services such as OSC’s Open OnDemand which supports web-based cluster resource access including Jupyter notebooks.

The current list of compute resources on ISAAC-NG can be found here. ISAAC-NG has: two “regular” GPU nodes with 48 Intel cores, 192 gigabytes of memory, and two NVIDIA V100 GPUs; seven “large” GPU nodes with 48 Intel cores, 768 gigabytes of memory, and one NVIDIA V100 GPU; and one “very large” GPU node with 64 Intel cores, 1 terabyte of memory, four NVIDIA A40 GPUs, and 54 terabytes of NVME for scratch space. The very large GPU would only be available for short reservations and not reservations spanning the entire semester.

Instructions to request the resources for academic course purposes are summarized as the following:

Step I: Submit a resources ticket request that includes the following:

• Course number and course name;
• Dedicated computing resources (e.g. number of CPUs, GPUs, etc.);
• Start and end time of the reservation for the computing resources;
• (Optional) List of software packages needed for the class;
• (Optional) If assistance is needed in preparing HPC-related materials for the course;
• (Optional) Any other support needed.

A new class project with 1 TB of storage space will be created for the current semester’s course by default, even if there is already a project for the same course from the previous semester. Instructors can ask for more as needed.

Step II: Ask the class participants to request an ISAAC account and go through the recordings of Workshops and Trainings to get an overview of using ISAAC. This is important because having an active ISAAC account is the prerequisite for a user accessing the class project.

Step III: After official class registration closes, update the ticket created in step one by uploading the class roster (in.csv or.txt format), including the student name and UT NetId. Each member of the class roster will have access to a class project, and all currently active class members will share the storage of the class project.

Step IV: Join Us on Zoom for any of the HPSC “Office Hours”, which is listed on the HPSC website, for any further assistance or request to schedule an ad-hoc Zoom meeting at other times.

(Note: only authenticated users will be able to enter the Zoom session)

By default, access to the class project will end after the completion of the current semester unless prior arrangements are made.

List of courses supported in the past.

OIT HPSC Academic Course Support Report

Spring 2024