Deployed in 2015, Discovery is New Mexico State University’s commonly-available High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The deployment of Discovery was initiated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) employees from the Systems Administration group who wanted to help researchers run their computations on a more powerful system than one they had sitting in their offices. Over the years, the cluster has grown 6 times, and as of March 2021 has 52 compute nodes, 1480 CPU cores, 17 Terabytes of RAM, 30 GPUs, and 1.5 Petabytes of usable storage. Discovery’s hardware is acquired using a combination of university funds, condo-model based funds, and grant funds, causing Discovery to be a heterogeneous system containing several CPU generations. This paper discusses our growth and administration experiences on this heterogeneous system, as well as our outreach and contribution to the HPC community.
