Side view, front view and top view of high performance computer built by the Faculty of Science and Sport in an RDF-financed research project.
High Performance Computers (HPCs) are typically expensive to construct; they usually cost hundreds of thousands to millions of US dollars. Current advances in technology, particularly those for the video game and streaming industry, have made it possible to construct HPCs at a relatively low cost. In light of this, a low-cost high-performance computer has recently been constructed as an experimental project by Mr. Norman Israel, Lecturer, Faculty of Science and Sport, with support from Mr Devon Stoddart, Lecturer, Faculty of Engineering and Computing, and Johnnouy Clarke, student, School of Computing and Information Technology, who completed his internship while working on the project.
This project was funded through the University’s Research Development Fund Research, which is managed by the School of Graduate Studies, Research and Entrepreneurship (SGSRE), which aims to support impactful research activities that will contribute to the realization of UTech, Jamaica’s Mission. The goal of the project was to demonstrate the possibility of building an HPC at low-cost and to show how such an HPC can be used to form a multidisciplinary computational science research core at the University. The project also aimed to suggest directions for expansion of the HPC and ways in which the University can ensure that it is effectively used to conduct research.
The low cost HPC was successfully constructed using NVIDIA Jetson Nano boards, which are single board computers used for a wide range of industrial applications in areas that include robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT). The HPC that has been constructed has the potential capability of performing billions of floating point operations per second on its Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The HPC is currently limited in its capacity, but is expandable and can be used to do GPU computing as well as machine learning. Currently, the device is a part of the apparatus of the Integrated Optics and Photonics Research Lab (IOPRL) in the Faculty of Science and Sport, and is accessible from the Optics lab.
The HPC is now being prepared to be used for CPU intensive simulations in the lab. The expansion of the HPC will allow for computational science beyond the lab so that it can be used by other divisions within the University. In addition, the device could also be used in teaching. A publication on benchmark testing results for the GPUs has been prepared for publication. A Technical Instructions Manual has also been produced to guide those who are interested in constructing an HPC.
