Mission
The Vermont Advanced Computing Center (VACC) is a research facility offering computing services to UVM faculty, staff and students.
VACC's mission includes strategic support in three key areas:
- advancing high-impact, multidisciplinary research efforts
- promoting advanced computing education and outreach across disciplines
- investing in next-generation, innovative and sustainable high-performance computing infrastructure models
History
In 2003, with early support from NASA and Senator Patrick Leahy, UVM undertook a campus-wide assessment of current needs and future directions for high-performance computing (HPC) in its research enterprise. The effort included discussions with an expert panel from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as well as UVM research leadership and faculty members across disciplines.
Affectionately known by its many users as the "Bluemoon cluster," the UVM VACC supercomputer has been largely developed with IBM systems architecture. The facility has received three major upgrades since its initial development, with next-generation, IBM high performance computing (HPC) hardware in order to optimize performance and data storage while maximizing data security and energy efficiency for an increasing number of users.
In 2019, using a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the university added a new computing cluster, dubbed DeepGreen. This massively parallel cluster is composed of over 70 GPUs capable of over 8 petaflops of mixed-precision calculations based on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 architecture. Its hybrid design can expedite high-throughput artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows, and its extreme parallelism will forge new and transformative research pipelines.