Phoenix: The Revival of Research Computing and the Launch of the New Cost Model at Georgia Tech

Originating from partnerships formed by central IT and researchers supporting their own clusters, the traditional condominium and dedicated cluster models for research computing are appealing and prevalent among emerging centers throughout academia. In 2008, Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) launched a campus strategy to centralize the hosting of computing resources across multiple science and engineering disciplines under a group of expert support personnel, and in 2009 the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) was formed. Due to the increases in scale over the past decade, however, the initial models created challenges for the research community, systems administrators, and GT’s leadership. In 2020, GT launched a strategic initiative to revitalize research computing through a refresh of the infrastructure and computational resources in parallel with the migration to a new state-of-the-art datacenter, Coda, followed by the transition to a new consumption-based cost model. These efforts have resulted in an overall increase in cluster utilization, access to more hardware, a decrease in queue wait times, a reduction in resource provision times, and increase in return on investment, suggesting that such a model is highly advantageous for academic research computing centers. Presented here are the methods employed in making the change to the new cost model, data supporting these claims, and the ongoing improvements to continue meeting the needs of the GT research community whose research is accelerated by the deployment of the new cost model and the Phoenix cluster that ranked #277 on the Top500 November 2020 list.