Orion: Discovery Environment for HPC Research and Bridging XSEDE Resources

We present a case study on how Georgia State University (GSU) has grown its active High Performance Computing (HPC) research community by 80% in 2015 over previous year, and how GSU is projected to double its active HPC research community for 2016 over 2015. In October 2015, GSU launched an institutional HPC resource, Orion, which provides batch and interactive compute environment. Currently, Orion supports both the traditional and non-traditional research communities on our campus as well as our affiliates from Qatar University, University of Toronto, and Georgia Tech. At GSU, Research Solutions' HPC facilitators are responsible for facilitating the HPC research, which is done in a form of providing technical support in developing pipelines and automating job submission process for various applications that researchers need for their research. This approach has resulted in nearly 80% growth in our active HPC users from 2014 to 2015, and currently we are tracking at doubling our active HPC user community in 2016. XSEDE remains a backbone of our ambitious goals, as we rely on XSEDE for providing us the necessary resources for select users whose research quickly exceeds our local infrastructure.