Core Scientific Plexus Software Extends Reach of San Diego HPC Center’s ‘Expanse’

Core Scientific, Inc. integrated its Plexus AI software stack with the Expanse petascale HPC recently launched by the San Diego HPC Center (SDSC), a computation and data analytics based at the University of California San Diego campus.

SDSC Expanse

Plexus AI software stack integrates with Expanse petascale super computer recently launched by SDSC

An innovation of Expanse is its ability to support composable systems, which can be described as the integration of computing elements such as a combination of CPU, GPU, and other resources into scientific workflows that may include data acquisition and processing, ML, and traditional simulation. While the main Expanse system is funded by the National Science Foundation, SDSC has recently installed additional capacity to support industrial workloads.

Exposing SDSC’s Expanse HPC platform via the company‘s Plexus software stack provides customers with a consumption-based HPC model that  solves for on-premise infrastructure, and also has the ability to run HPC workloads in HPC centers as well as in the any of the 4 major public cloud providers – all from a single pane of glass.

“We are excited to make the power of the Expanse HPC available to industry researchers and other customers who need state-of-the-art HPC capabilities,” said Ron Hawkins, director, industry relations, SDSC. “Core Scientific’s Plexus software stack provides end-customers access to our infrastructure in an intuitive, cloud-like point and click experience, which is a potential game changer for HPC centers.“

Expanse, which entered service in December 2020, consists of nearly 800 AMD EPYC (Rome) based compute nodes with a 12PB parallel file system and Mellanox IB HDR interconnect, with over 100,000 cores available to the demanding HPC workloads.

“SDSC’s Expanse is a unique and innovative HPC that supports a wide range of scientific workloads,” said Ian Ferreira, chief product officer, AI, Core Scientific. “Being able to democratize this infrastructure via our Plexus software stack will enable researchers and scientists to seamlessly work between CPU and GPU bound classes of problems, all via a single, easy to use interface.“