Texas Tech professors awarded $12 million for data center and AI research

(Press-News.org) Texas Tech University researchers have received grant funding totaling roughly $12.25 million over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore infrastructure necessary for large-scale computing that uses multiple energy sources.

The REmotely-managed Power-Aware Computing Systems and Services (REPACSS) project will build an advanced system prototype and develop and test tools for automation, remote data control, and scientific workflow management.

REPACSS will be housed at the Texas Tech Reese National Security Complex (RNSC) as part of NSF's "Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support" (ACCESS) national research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem and will provide access to these resources to researchers throughout the country. 

The project brings together contributors from various Texas Tech entities, including the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering from the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering, the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) and the Global Laboratory for Energy Asset Management and Manufacturing (GLEAMM).

Yong Chen, principal investigator for the REPACSS project and Computer Science chair, highlighted the magnitude of this accomplishment in that Texas Tech beat out numerous top schools nationwide for highly competitive NSF funding.

Texas Tech received this award as a single-institution, stand-alone project under the NSF Advanced Computing Systems & Services (ACSS) program through the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, although most awards in this program are received in collaboration with or solely by a national-scale, leadership-class supercomputing facility.

The project also aims to support the recent trend of establishing data centers in the region, such as the $500 billion Stargate Project in Abilene being pursued by artificial intelligence (AI) stakeholders including OpenAI, or the proposed Fermi America project on Texas Tech leased land.

Such projects will rely on access to multiple energy sources including solar and wind power facilities that are abundant in this area, gas and oil, battery energy storage and/or nuclear power and will need to optimize the use of these sources based on availability and cost.  

While pursuing similar goals, REPACSS will differ in multiple ways from such efforts, including its focus on providing for the needs of a wide range of scientific workflows instead of a limited number of tasks devoted to one workflow typical of a hyperscaler company.

“NSF is very interested in our ability to pursue this work because it obviously has extremely practical outcomes, but it is in the context of academic and scientific computing, which makes it a little different from these commercial data centers,” said Alan Sill, HPCC managing director and co-director along with Chen for the REPACSS project.

The Texas Tech HPCC handles over 1,000 unique users of its equipment and services, comprising dozens of Texas Tech research groups investigating a range of topics. That variety is an example of the challenges for this project in terms of addressing power availability and cooling requirements for academic computing.

REPACSS is a multiyear project consisting of several phases. Commissioning the facility to be run at RNSC was the first step, to be followed by promotion through the academic and industry communities, then developing software tools and methods of operation to the issue of building large-scale data centers with respect to economic and environmental factors.

The project is a development 10 years in the making, accounting for Chen and Sill’s previous work with major manufacturers of data center clusters and equipment to improve the efficiency and instrumentation of large clusters of computers. GLEAMM’s involvement is another layer, as it was built in 2015 with funding from the state of Texas to initially study how to adapt different forms of energy onto Texas’ electrical grid.

REPACSS will also contain an educational element for Texas Tech students, staff, and researchers to allow them to learn the principles and practical aspects of operating large-scale data centers. 

Students will be able to learn more about the cybersecurity of significant, multi-user, variable-energy computational resources such as REPACSS that enable researchers to experiment with advanced, interdisciplinary computational models at reduced costs, according to Susan Mengel, one of the REPACSS project’s senior personnel and an associate professor of computer science. 

“Students can learn how to help researchers preserve and work within their allotted energy and resource usage, place protective boundaries on their executing software, and keep their data private,” said Mengel. 

Graduate researchers will learn how to install software that allows users to be on the computer simultaneously, schedule the jobs that need to be run to best take advantage of the energy available, and analyze programs to predict and reduce their energy usage.

Chen, Sill and other REPACSS investigators are excited by the number of students that will be available to assist the project’s operation and learn, a luxury most other NSF ACCESS researchers don’t have.

“I’ve already made the point to some of our potential industry partners that, as opposed to hiring someone and training them, our students are designing and running data centers,” Chen said. “They will come out with the knowledge beforehand for the data center and AI industry, so we see the option to apply for training grants related to this infrastructure, too.”

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