The new CyberGIS supercomputer, ROGER (Resourcing Open Geospatial Education and Research), funded through National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant, is now available for research allocation request. Located at the National Petascale Computing Facility next to Blue Waters, ROGER is designed especially for geospatial applications requiring advanced cyberinfrastructure. Each computing node has access to over 4 petabytes of high speed persistent storage and at least 128 gigabytes of local memory, and the connects to external networks at 40Gb/s. ROGER is a uniquely designed system that integrates subsystems dedicated to traditional batch high performance computing (HPC) (a number of which have Nvidia Tesla K40 Graphic Processing Units (GPUs)), data-intensive computing (e.g. Hadoop, Spark), and an OpenStack private cloud, enabling users to take advantage of the best computing paradigm for their needs. Complete technical summary of the system can be found here. On the software side, ROGER now has a number of traditional scientific and geospatial software packages installed and the software capabilities on ROGER continuously evolve in response to the needs of the user community.

If you are interested in using the unique resources offered by ROGER in your research and/or education activities, allocations are easy to request. All you need to do is to submit a short proposal following the instructions found at https://wiki.ncsa.illinois.edu/display/ROGER/ROGER+Allocations+Request.