Anvil - System Architecture and Experiences from Deployment and Early User Operations

Abstract

Anvil is a new XSEDE advanced capacity computational resource funded by NSF. Designed with a systematic strategy to meet the ever increasing and diversifying research needs for advanced computational capacity, Anvil integrates a large capacity high-performance computing (HPC) system with a comprehensive ecosystem of software, access interfaces, programming environments, and composable services in a seamless environment to support a broad range of current and future science and engineering applications of the nation's research community. Anchored by a 1000-node CPU cluster featuring the latest AMD EPYC 3rd generation (Milan) processors, along with a set of 1TB large memory and NVIDIA A100 GPU nodes, Anvil integrates a multi-tier storage system, a Kubernetes composable subsystem, and a pathway to Azure commercial cloud to support a variety of workflows and storage needs. Anvil was successfully deployed and integrated with XSEDE during the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. Entering production operation in February 2022, Anvil will serve the nation's science and engineering research community for five years. This paper describes the Anvil system and services, including its various components and subsystems, user facing features, and shares the Anvil team's experience through its early user access program from November 2021 through January 2022.