Page 11 - OIT Progress Report: 2025 Edition

SMU
SMU attained a significant achievement
this year by earning the Carnegie R1
classification. Teams across OIT provide
sustained support for research initiatives
by managing the High-Performance
Computing (HPC) environment,
facilitating Internet of Things (IoT)
device development, overseeing software
licensing, and organizing various
workshops. Collaborating closely with
faculty throughout the university, they
apply substantial expertise to strengthen
and advance research activities.
ColdFront
To enhance the account provisioning and
management of our HPC resources, ColdFront
was deployed to both the SuperPod and M3
environments. ColdFront allows faculty to create
a project and assign individuals to that project for
collaboration. Simply by adding individuals to a
project, accounts are provisioned automatically
without requiring additional forms and delays.
Faculty are also able to sponsor a class-based
project and permissions are automatically
updated as students add or drop through an
integration with my.SMU. This allows faculty
and students to rapidly onboard to the HPC
environment. Dr. John LaGrone, HPC Application
Scientist, shared, “This solution allows eligible
faculty and staff to manage their own HPC
projects more directly and efficiently with a
substantially self-service platform. It has also
largely automated what was a manual, ticket-
based process, eliminating delays to research
activities on HPC.”
This new solution also offers significant reporting
capabilities providing faculty greater insights
into utilization, allocation, storage use and more.
To support additional reporting, XDMOD was
implemented for HPC leadership to view similar
data across both clusters. These metrics are
critical to faculty as well as university leadership
to ensure our HPC environment is well managed,
used, and provide insight for planning the next
iteration of compute resources.
“ This solution allows
eligible faculty and
staff to manage their
own HPC projects more
directly and efficiently
with a substantially
self-service platform.”
DR. JOHN LAGRONE
HPC APPLICATION SCIENTIST
Cellular GPS Study
OIT collaborated with Dr. Nicos Makris from
the Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering on a project utilizing cell phone GPS
data to examine urban resiliency. The resulting
2023 paper received the James R. Croes Medal
from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The project used SMU’s Nvidia SuperPod to
process and analyze large datasets with a
physics-informed model.
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