Research Projects

The aim of the project is to increase the research and innovation capacity of UPT by creating a high-performance, heterogenous, energy efficient, private cloud computing node based on open technologies, which is connected to national and international networks of research cloud infrastructures, and which has direct applicability in the collection, storage, analysis, distribution and the protection of the massive data produced by the research and innovation initiatives carried out in the western region of Romania.

The main target group of the project consists of all the UPT researchers and PhD students, regardless of the research field in which they operate, who can benefit from the services provided by IT-specific tools, provided in the form of centralized computing services, storage and productivity. The project also targets public and private research partners which collaborate with the UPT at local, national and international level.

Objectives:

• Implementation of an energy-efficient, HPC-type of computing and data storage infrastructure to provide flexible to manage and resource scalable virtual environments
• Implementation of a large capacity data collection, storage and interchange platform, to be provided as a service (PaaS - Platform as a Service). Three categories of specific data are considered for validating this implementation: (a) crowdsourcing/ IoT type of data, (b) multimedia type of data and (c) geographical type of data
• Implementation of a platform for cloud-based functions (FaaS - Function as a Service), for data processing and analysis. The project also includes the implementation of a demo deep learning application for the intelligent selection of a subset of images (at least 1M images), based on diversity estimation
• Implementation of a local solution for managing and storing of the personal data which results from the research and innovation activities within UPT, according to the new GDPR standards

An overview of the hardware implementation results, from the perspective of the nodes assembly and their capabilities, including the storage and FPGA nodes:

• Total of processing and storage nodes: 19
• Total of processing and storage cores: 352
• Total memory capacity: 4000 GB
• Total storage capacity; 598 TB (raw), 417 TB (usable)
• Node connectivity: 40 Gbps
• GPU boards: 4 x NVIDIA Tesla T4 16GB, Passive, Single Wide, Full Height GPU
• FPGA modules:
  • 2 x Intel FPGA PAC with Arria10 GX, 70W FH
  • 2 x Intel PAC D5005, Stratix10, 32GB, 215W, Double Wide, Full Height, QSFP28 FPGA